“Now, Lily, my dearest, how can you ask such a question? Is that all? Nothing is all! There are no bounds to what is between you and me; but because we have to be parted for a time that was not a reason for always keeping apart, was it, Lily? I thought, my darling, you agreed with me there. We have had a happy honeymoon as ever any pair had, happier, I think, than ever any blessed man but me. And now I must go out to the bleak world to work for my bonnie wife. Oh, it will be a bleak world no longer; it will all be bright with the thought that it is for my bonnie Lily. And you will just wait and keep your heart in a kist of gold, and lock it with a silver key.” “Ah, that was what she says she should have done before----” cried Lily with a sharp ring of pain in her voice. Then she subdued herself and looked up into his face. “I am ready to share whatever you have, Ronald. I want no luxuries, no grand house. I want no time to get ready. I’ll be up before you to-morrow and my little things in a bundle and ready to follow you, if it was in a baggage-wagon or at the plough’s tail!” “I almost wish it was that,” he said, eager for any diversion. “If I had been a ploughman lad, coming over the hills to Nannie O; with a little cot to take her to as soon as she could be my own!” These were echoes of the songs Lily had sung to him, and he to her, in their hermitage when shut in by the snow. “But just up under the roof in a high house in the old town, or one of the new ones out to the west of Princes Street--that new row, with a nice clean stair and a door to it to shut it in: to me that would be as good as any little cot upon the ploughed fields.” Lily spoke eagerly, turning round to him with hands involuntarily clasped. “A strange place,” he said, “for Sir Robert Ramsay’s heir.” “Oh, what am I caring for Sir Robert Ramsay! If he was ill and wanted me, I would be at his call night and day--he is my uncle, whatever happens; but because he is rich and can leave me a fortune! that is nothing, Ronald, to you and me.” He made no immediate reply, but smoothed the little curls of her hair upon her forehead, which was at once an easier and a much more pleasant thing to do. “Besides,” she said, “I have known plenty of kent folk, as good as you or me, who lived, and just liked it very well, up a common stair.” “I would not like my Lily, coming out of George Square, to set up in life like that.” “Would you like your Lily,” she cried again, turning upon him with glowing cheeks, “to sit alone and pingle at her seam and eat her heart away, even at George Square, where she might see you whiles, or, worse still, here at Dalrugas,” she said, springing from her seat with energy, “to be smoored in the snow?” He followed her round to the window, and stood holding her in his arm and looking at her admiringly. “You will never be smoored in the snow, my Lily! The fire in you is enough to melt it into rivers all about.”