“Lily!” he cried, sitting up in his chair with an astonished face, “why, what is the matter with you, my darling?” “Nothing is the matter with me! except to hear you laugh at what was sorrow and pain to them, and deadly earnest, as any person might see.” “Havers!” cried Ronald; “he had his tongue in his cheek all the time, yon fellow. He thought, no doubt, her father must have money, and it would be worth his while----” “If you believe that every-body thinks first of money----” Lily said, her hand, which was on the table, quivering to every finger’s end. “Most of us do,” he said quietly; “but what does it mean that my Lily should be so disturbed about Alick Duff, the ne’er-do-well, and Helen Blythe?” “I can’t tell you,” cried Lily, struggling with that dreadful, inevitable inclination to tears which is so hard upon women. “I am--much alone in this place,” she said, with a quiver of her mouth, “and you away.” “My bonnie Lily!” he cried once more, hastening to her, soothing her in his arms, as he had done so often before. That was all, that was all he could say or do to comfort her; and that does not always answer--not, at least, as it did the first or even the second or third time. To call her “My bonnie Lily!” to lean her head upon his breast that she might cry it all out there and be comforted, was no reply to the demand in her heart. And the hysteria passion did not come to tears in this case. She choked them down by a violent effort. She subdued herself, and withdrew from his supporting arm, not angrily, but with something new in her seriousness which startled Ronald, he could not tell why. “We will go upstairs,” she said, “or, if you would like it, out on the moor. It is bonnie on the moor these long, long days, when it is night, and the day never ends. And then you can tell me the rest of your Edinburgh news,” she said, suddenly looking into his face. Oh, he understood her now! His face was not delicate like Lily’s to show every tinge of changing color, but it reddened through the red and the brown with a color that showed more darkly and quite as plainly as the blush on any girl’s face. He understood what was the Edinburgh news she wanted. Was it that he had none to give? “Let us go out on the moor,” he said. “Where is your plaid to wrap you round? It may be as beautiful as you like, but it’s always cold on a north country moor.”