Was it true? Oh, yes; it was true. In Scotland you do not find an empty house and go into it whenever you want to--especially not in the Scotland of those days. You have to wait for the term, which is the legitimate time. Nevertheless Lily was very sure that, if she were now in Edinburgh looking for a place to establish her nest in, she would find it; but perhaps a man has not the time, perhaps he cannot take the trouble, going upstairs and down stairs looking at all kinds of unlikely places. This, Lily felt sure, was another of the things that gentlemen could not abide. “We must make the best of you, then, while we have you,” she said, drawing her chair to the side of the fire after their dinner together. It was cold at night, though the hardy folk of the North were content to believe that spring was coming, and that there was a different “feel” in the air. The wind was sweeping over the moor as keen as a knife, bending the gray bushes of the ling and spare rowan-trees that cowered before it like human travellers caught in the cutting breeze. There was a cold moon shining fitfully, with frightened, swift-flying glimpses from among the clouds which flew over her face. Colder than the depth of winter outside, but within, with the firelight and lamplight, and Lily making the best of her husband’s flying visit, very bright and very warm. “I will just look for the next term, Ronald, and pack up all my things and be ready, so that if you came suddenly, as you did the other day----” “Do you bid me, then,” he said, “not to come till Whit-Sunday? which is a long time to be without a sight of my Lily. If I should have another chance like this of getting a day or two--which is better than nothing----” “Oh, no, do not miss the day or two,” cried Lily; “how could you think I meant that? But I’ll look for the term-time, like the maids when they’re changing their places. It’s more than that to me, for it will be the first home I have ever had. Uncle Robert’s house was never a home--there was no woman in it.” “Nor will there be any woman, Lily----” “I will be the woman,” she cried, with a playful blow on his shoulder; “it is me that will make it home. And you will be the man. And if any stranger comes into it--not to say a poor, motherless bairn like what I was--their hearts will sing for pleasure; for there will be one for kindness and warmness, and one for protecting and caring, and that will make it home. Uncle Robert was but one, and not one that was caring. If you were there, he just let you be. ‘Oh,’ he would say, ‘you are here!’ as if it was a surprise. Do you wonder that I hunger and thirst for my own home, Ronald, when I never had in my life any thing but that?” “It will come in its time, my Lily,” he said, holding her close to him, with her hands in his. “Ay, but you mind what Shakespeare says: ‘While the grass grows----’” “If the proverb was musty then,” said Ronald, with a laugh, “it’s mustier now.”