’And you, Launce, my lad, will also one day desire to leave kissing comfits and find abiding love. And you need not go far afield to look for it either.’ Thus I was left alone with a heaving heart. And I am not ashamed to say that I wept bitterly for poor Launce Kennedy, who had none to care for him in all the wide lone world, in which he was now so sore wounded and cast aside like an old shoe or a broken sword. But even as I wept and pitied myself, Nell Kennedy danced in, merry as the morn, and brought a great spray of belated hawthorn to set in a dish of water to keep the room sweet. And I declare I never knew the young lass look so winsome before. *CHAPTER XXII* *A MARRIAGE MADE IN HELL* When Robert Harburgh came in to see me in the evening, I was chill enough in my reception; but since he was of a calm temper, though so great a sworder, I might just as well have embraced him, for all the difference it made to him. ’So,’ I said, without giving him more than time to sit down—for all my days I must ever fly headlong at a thing and have done with it—’so you are going to marry Kate Allison?’ ’She was proposing so,’ said he, as calmly as when he had walked across the yard to the summer-house, with the hackbutt bullets splattering about him and the guns going crack-crack down the hedgerows, like the thumbs of a class of bairns when the dominie asks a question. ’So,’ said I. ’And you were thinking, maybe, that that was the action of a friend when your comrade was laid by the heels?’ ’I was thinking so,’ said he, looking out of the window at the trees. ’Did you not know,’ I cried, for I was angered beyond words, being weak, and taking ill with the cherry being thus snatched out of my mouth, ’did you not know that Kate Allison was my lass before she was yours? Did she not tell you that?’ said I. Now, had I been myself, I should not thus have told left-handed tales on a lass, even though I believed with some reason that she had deceived me. ’I was not deprived of the sight of my eyes,’ said he, very quietly. ’And you mean by that—?’ said I, trembling with anger. ’That I did not need telling that you had been courting the lass off and on for a year or twa, and that she took it not ill.’ ’And, in spite of that, you made up to Kate Allison when I was lying sick unto death upon my bed?’ I asked him bitterly. ’How long may you have kenned Kate Allison?’ said Robert Harburgh to me in his turn. ’Six years or so,’ said I. ’And did you ever, in all that time, ask her to marry you?’ he inquired. ’No,’ said I, not seeing what he was driving at. ’Then,’ said Robert, very drily, ’I did, though I kenned her not six weeks. And I would not wonder,’ he went on, as though deep in meditation, ’I would not wonder but that is the reason why she is going to marry me.’