'Oh, do! Run off with me, as the Red Reiver and all these nice, interesting sort of people used to do long ago. Let us abscond, and not tell a single living soul, except the faithful Teen.' But Walter shook his head. 'It is what I should like to do above everything, but I must resist the temptation. No, my darling; for your sake, everything must be most scrupulously conventional, if a little hurried. I shall pay your guardian a visit to-morrow morning, which will somewhat astonish him.' Gladys looked at him with a sudden access of admiration. To hear him speak in that calm, masterful tone pleased her as nothing else could have done. 'But you won't let them frighten you, and abscond without me? That would be too mean,' she said saucily. Walter made no verbal reply, and so, hand in hand, they turned to leave the moonlit woods, and there was a look on the face of Walter such as you see on the faces of reverent worshippers who have found rest and peace to their souls. 'Poor Liz!' he said under his breath, as he uplifted his eyes to the clear sky, as if seeking to penetrate its mystery, and find whither that wayward soul had fled. Gladys laid her soft cheek against his arm, and silence fell upon them again. But the heart of each was full to the uttermost, and they asked no more. It was, indeed, the world well lost for love. * * * * * On the morning of the ninth of October, this announcement appeared in the marriage list of the _Glasgow Herald_, and was read and discussed at many breakfast-tables:-- 'At Bourhill, Ayrshire, on the 8th instant, Walter Hepburn to Gladys Graham.' It may be added that it was a source of profound wonder to many, and of awful chagrin to a few. In the house of the Pollokshields' Fordyces the announcement was discreetly tabooed, though George must have felt it keenly, seeing Gladys had suffered so little over the unhappy termination of their engagement that she could substitute another bridegroom though retaining the same marriage-day. On the fourteenth the young couple set sail for the land of the Southern Cross, and were absent exactly twelve months, the reason for their return being that they wished their first-born child to see the light first in Bourhill. And they never left it again; for Walter made use of the Colonial connection he had made to build up a new business in Glasgow, which has prospered far above his expectation. So fortune has blessed him in the end, and he can admit now that the bitterness of the old days was not without its purpose. The faithful Teen, no longer melancholy, reigns in a snug house of her own, not a hundred miles from Mauchline, but retains her old adoration for Bourhill and its bonnie, sweet mistress.