And the autumnal holiday was, as he anticipated, actually a happy moment in their lives. Before it came Lily had time to go through many fits of despair, and many storms of impatience and indignation. To have one great struggle in life and then to be forever done, and fall into a steady unhappiness in one portion of existence as you have been persistently happy in another, is a thing which seems natural enough when the first break comes in one’s career. But Lily soon learned the great difference here between imagination and reality. There was not a day in which she did not go through that struggle again, and sank into despair and flamed with anger, and then felt herself quieted into the moderation of exhaustion, and then beguiled again by springing hopes and insinuating visions of happiness. Thus notwithstanding all the bitterness of Lily’s feelings on various points, or rather, perhaps, in consequence of the evident certainty that nothing would make Ronald see as she did, or even perceive what it was that she wanted and did not want--the eagerness of her passion for the house, which meant honor and truth to her, but to him only a rash risking of their chances, and foolish impatience on her part to have her way, as is the worst of women--and her bitter sense of the impossibility of his calm establishment here in her uncle’s house, a thing which he regarded as the simplest matter in the world, with a chuckle over the discomfiture of the old uncle--all these things, by dint of being too much to grapple with, fell from despair into the ordinary of life. And Lily agreed with herself to push them away, not to think when she could help it, to accept what she could--the modified happiness, the love and sweetness which are, alas! of themselves not enough to nourish a wholesome existence. She was happy, more or less, when he came in with his gun over his shoulder, and a bag at which Dougal looked with critical but unapproving eyes. Dougal himself took, or had permission, to shoot over Sir Robert’s estate, which was not of great extent. These were not yet the days when even a little bit of Highland shooting is worth a better rent than a farm, and the birds had grown wild about Dalrugas with only Dougal’s efforts at “keeping them down.” What the country thought of Ronald’s position it would be hard to say. He gave himself out as living at Tam Robison’s, the shepherd’s, and being favored by Sir Robert Ramsay’s grieve in the matter of the shooting, which there was nobody to enjoy. No doubt it was well enough known that he was constantly at Dalrugas, but a country neighborhood is sometimes as opaque to perceive any thing doubtful as it is lynx-eyed in other cases. And as few people visited at Dalrugas, there was no scandal so far as any one knew.