"He," I said, "had all the ruder qualities admired by women, those of manliness, which good women may like, and the others which the other women secretly like. It was not difficult to see him, both as a hero and as a villain, and either way the pull of romance lay about him. He had particular ambitions which brought him between the maid and the first man, and there was, thanks to certain elements in human ties and high affairs, a strong influence favourable to those ambitions. But, as chance or Providence would have it, he was translated to another land, and there he found such comfort and companionship that he decided to stay. This left the maid and the man who feared too much, free to be to each other what they desired; and there ends my parable." "But," asked Marget with unsteady words which betrayed her agitation, "where is its moral? A parable must have a moral." "Has it none?" I boldly asked her, taking her hand in mine, before she or I knew it, and kissing it and then her rosy, rebellious lips. By-and-by she looked at me through wet eye-lashes and asked, "Shall I tell you a parable which had a moral, though maybe it has lost it," and her tears laughed. "Do," I said; "I can stand the moral now, whatever it may be." "It should be a severe moral for you," she whispered, "because you have been so foolish, so little understanding with me, yet I'll try and make it light. It also concerns a maiden and two men, but she only cared for one of the men, never at all for the other. Nor would all the family interests in the world have made her marry the other. The real man, well, he seemed not to know that there is a precipice of influences, of circumstances, for every woman, over which she may be let slip by his hesitation; and this without possibility of return, for, even if she could return, her sex pride would not let her." "Ah," I whispered, "and the moral?" "That you deserved to lose me; and that it would have broken my heart if you had." We sat very close, hand in hand, mind in mind, heart in heart, and watched the sun go down behind the silent hills of our beloved Corgarff, both of us silent, like them. Years have gone by since then, and they have proved to us how sure a conduct is the heart alike to happiness, and, though it matters less, to prosperity. March where the tune of its soft beating calls, and you are blessed. Traffic with it, and you miss the real lift of life, that which makes life good, whatever betides. Marget and I had learned this in the school of sweet-hearting, and now we knew it in the joy of confiding words. Nothing else mattered, because it mattered all, but when the inner world is well the outer world responds to it in kind. The private happiness which we had won made a larger good fortune for us without, or at all events, we saw the morning radiance, not the morning mists.