“And so you are, my dearest, making a sunshine in a shady place. But still we must think of that. Winter and summer are two different things. Cannot we find a friend to take us in?” “I will tell you where we shall find a friend. You’ll come to the Tower with your boldest face as if it was the first time you had been near. And you will ask: ‘Does Miss Ramsay live here?’ And Katrin will say: ‘’Deed does she, sir. Here and no other place.’ And you will smite your thigh in your surprise, and say: ‘I thought I had heard that! I am a friend from Edinburgh, and I just stopped on the road to [here say any name you please] to say “Good-day” to the young lady, if she was here.’ And then you will look about, and you will say: ‘It is rather a lonesome place.’” “Go on,” said Ronald, laughing; “I like the dialogue--though whether we should trust your keepers so far as that----” “My keepers! They are my best of friends! Well, Katrin will look round too, and she will say, as if considering the subject for the first time: ‘In winter it is, maybe, a wee lonesome--for a young leddy. Ye’ll maybe be a friend of Sir Robert’s, too?’ And you will say: ‘Oh, yes, I am a great friend of Sir Robert’s.’ And she will open the door wide and say: ‘Come ben, sir, come ben. It will be a great divert to our young leddy to see a visitor. And you’re kindly welcome.’ That’s what she will say.” “Will she say all that, and shall I say all that? Perhaps I shall, including that specious phrase about being a friend of Sir Robert’s, which would surprise Sir Robert very much.” “Well, you know him, surely, and you are not unfriends. It strikes me that, to be a lawyer, Ronald, you are full of scruples.” “What a testimonial to my virtue!” he said, with a laugh. “But it is not scruples; it is pure cowardice, Lily. Are they to be trusted? If Sir Robert were to be written to, and I to be forbidden the door, and my Lily carried off to a worse wilderness, abroad, as he threatened!” “I will tell you one thing: I will not go!” said Lily, “not if Sir Robert were ten times my uncle. But you need not fear for Katrin. She likes me better than Sir Robert. You may think that singular, but so it is. And I am much more fun,” cried Lily, “far more interesting! I include you, and you and me together, we are a story, we are a romance! And Katrin will like us better than one of the Waverley novels, and she will be true to us to the last drop of her blood.” “These Highlanders, you never can be sure of them,” said Ronald, shaking his head. He spoke the sentiment of his time and district, which was too near the Highland line to put much confidence in the Celt. “But she is not a Highlander. She is Aberdeen,” cried Lily. “Beenie is a Highlander, if you call Kinloch-Rugas Highland, and she is as true as steel. Oh, you are a person of prejudices, Ronald; but I trust all the world,” she cried, lifting her fine and shining face to the shining sky.