What chapters, what books, we talked sitting in the gorse bushes on Daddy Hole Plain! In the evening of my days I shall doubtless be glad that I climbed those heights, remembering that Archibald had to exert himself somewhat arduously in order to ask me to marry him. I wanted to be alone and feast my eyes on the dazzling blue of the sea, one broad expanse of sapphire, stretching off, off, into eternity; a blue all be-diamonded with sunlit sparkles; a blue touched with foam-flecks wherever it broke on the rocks or the islets. Granted that any view has charms when one is young and in love, the view from Daddy Hole Plain would inspire an octogenarian, or even a misogynist. 'It was in Exeter we really met, you remember,' I reminded Archibald. 'I am not likely to forget it.' 'Do you chance to know the motto that your virgin queen, Elizabeth, bestowed upon Exeter? It was _Semper fidelis_.' 'That's a good omen, isn't it,' he said. 'You always do find out the cleverest things, Virginia! How am I ever to keep up with you?' 'Don't try!' I answered, quite too happy to be anything but vainglorious. 'Gaze at me on my superior intellectual height, and when I meet your admiring eyes you can trust me to remember that though you are voluntarily standing on a step below, your head is higher than mine after all! Archibald, do you know what I am to give you for a wedding present?' 'No,' he answered gravely; 'is it your mother?' 'No, I am going to lend mamma to Miss Evesham for a little, until her turn comes,--dear old Cecilia!' 'Do you think it will ever come?' 'It's only just round the corner; Cupid is even now sharpening his arrows and painting little pictures on the shafts.' 'Oh, I see! Well, is it Greytoria? for I don't mind saying that I'm quite ready to give her a stall in my stables at Kindarroch; though of all the ill-conducted and lazy little brutes--' 'Be careful, Archibald,' I exclaimed warningly; 'you owe some few hours of martyrdom, but many a debt of gratitude, to that same Greytoria.' 'I remember only one,' he said, looking at me in a very embarrassing way, 'and by George, she cut that one short! But I give it up--the wedding present; I can't guess, and I don't care specially, so long as you come along with it.' 'I shall come with it, and in it, if the faithful Johnson will steer me,--it's going to be a new motor!' 'Well, you owe it to me, Virginia,' he cried with enthusiasm, 'for mine isn't worth a brass farthing at this moment. I knew before I had been at Grey Tor twenty-four hours that it was going to be knocked into smithereens, but I hadn't the pluck to take it or myself out of harm's way. Now we are both done for!' 'Which do you prefer?' I asked,'your old motor or me?' 'You, with a new one,' he answered unblushingly. 'We'll take our wedding journey in it, shall we? Early this autumn would be a good time.' 'And mamma and Cecilia and Mrs. MacGill can follow behind with Greytoria.'