'"You do me great honour, and must have singular confidence in me, a stranger, that you trust yourself with me thus." '"How we glide!" exclaimed the girl, with childish glee. "Oh, I could sail here for ever!" '"What would mamma think, if she knew it?" '"Being with you?" '"Yes." '"I scarcely know what she would think; but I know what she would _do_," was the reply. '"Admonish you?" '"Yes; and lock me up for days to come. But I can see, of course, that you are a gentleman." '"Thanks for the compliment." '"But it is difficult to say what else; your costume is so unlike anyone we see hereabout." 'I wore simply a rowing suit of white flannel, trimmed and faced with blue, with a skull-cap to match. '"I am a Lancer," said I. '"A Lancer!" she repeated, while her blue eyes dilated. '"Yes; I command the troop in Perth Barracks." 'I could see that the information pleased her, for her colour rose and she looked aside; and again I pondered as to whether she was the hoyden by nature I suspected. '"I must return home now," she said suddenly, as if she read my thoughts in my face. '"So soon?" I urged, pleadingly. '"Yes; and thanks, so much, for your row--it has been delightful." '"I shall be so glad to row you further next time." '"You talk as if you expected to see me again--as if it were quite a matter of course." '"I can only hope to do so," said I, handing her ashore and retaining her little, ungloved hand, lingeringly in mine; "but I row past here every day, _at the same hour_." '"Good-bye," said she, about to turn away. '"May I ask your name?" said I, cap in hand. '"Annabelle Erroll." '"Why do you start so?" she asked laughingly, and, tripping up the bank, vanished among the white stems of the silver birches, leaving her ferns in the boat behind her. 'Start! Well might I do so; for I now discovered that she was my cousin, the daughter of a widowed maternal Aunt Annabelle, with whom my parents had ever been at enmity, about some money quarrel, with her husband, Colonel Erroll--an aunt whom I had never met, and of whose existence I had but a vague idea. 'My cousin she was, and proud, greedy old Uncle Erroll's daughter! I would rather not have heard this; for the girl's rare beauty attracted me powerfully on one hand, while the transmitted stories of the family feud--stories which in boyhood made me regard the colonel and his wife as an ogre and ogress--on the other, had a fatal effect upon me. 'That her mother yet kept up the feud, was evident from the circumstance that she had never mentioned to Annabelle the fact, which she must have known, that I commanded the Lancers at the barrack within a few miles of their own house. Yet to have done so would have served no end; though I thought not of that. 'Would the young girl understand, or accept, my _hint_?