Beenie found her young mistress radiant in the morning as she had left her radiant when she went to bed. The young girl’s countenance could not contain her smiles; they seemed to ripple over, to mingle with the light, to make sunshine where there was none. What could have happened to her in that social hour when Robina was at supper with her friends, usually one of the dullest of the twenty-four to lonely Lily? Whom could she have seen, what could she have heard, to light those lamps of happiness in her eyes? But Robina could not divine what it was, and Lily laughed and flouted, and reproached her with smiles always running over. “You were so busy with your supper you never looked what might be happening to me. You and Katrin and Dougal were so full of your cracks you had no eyes for a poor lassie. I might have been lost upon the moor and you would never have found it out. But I was not lost, you see, only wonderfully diverted, and spent a happy evening, and you never knew.” “Miss Lily,” said Beenie, with tears, “never more, if I should starve, will I go down to my supper again!” “You will just go down to your supper to-night and every night, and have your cracks with Dougal and Katrin, and be as happy as you can, for I am happy too. I am lonely no more. I am just the Lily I used to be before trouble came--oh, better! for it’s finer to be happy again after trouble than when you are just innocent and never have learned what it is.” “The Lord bless us all!” cried Beenie solemnly, “the bairn speaks as if she had gone, like Eve, into the thickest of the gairden and eaten of the tree----” “So I have,” said Lily. “I once was just happy like the bairn you call me, and then I was miserable. And now I know the difference, for I’m happy again, and so I will always be.” “Oh, Miss Lily,” said Beenie, “to say you will always be is just flying in the face of Providence, for there is nobody in this world that is always happy. We would be mair than mortal if we could be sure of that.” “But I am sure of it,” said Lily, “for what made me miserable was just misjudging a person. I thought I understood, and I didn’t understand. And now I do; and if I were to live to a hundred, I would never make that mistake again. And it lies at the bottom of every thing. I may be ill, I may be poor, I may have other troubles, but I can never, never,” said Lily, placing piously her hands together, “have that unhappiness which is the one that gives bitterness to all the rest--again.” “My bonnie lady! I wish I knew what you were meaning,” Beenie said. Lily kept her hands clasped and her head raised a little, as if she were saying a prayer. And then she turned with a graver countenance to her wondering maid. “Do you think,” she said, “that Dougal or Katrin--but I don’t think Katrin--writes to Uncle Robert and tells him every thing I do?” “Dougal or Katrin write to Sir Robert? But what would they do that for?” said Beenie, with wide-open eyes.