"This will never do. You must 'come under my plaidie,' as the children say, and I will take you home at once. Boys!" he called out to the figures now appearing like jackdaws at the top of the tower, "we are going straight home. Follow us as soon as you like. Yes, it must be so," he answered to the slight resistance she made. "They must all take care of themselves. I mean to take care of you." Which he did, wrapping her well in the half of his plaid, drawing her hand under his arm and holding it there--holding it close and warm at his heart all the way along the Scores and across the Links, scarcely speaking a single word until they reached the garden gate. Even there he held it still. "I see your girls coming, so I shall leave you. You are warm now, are you not?" "Quite warm." "Good-night, then. Stay. Tell me"--he spoke rapidly, and with much agitation--"tell me just one thing, and I will never trouble you again. Why did you not answer a letter I wrote to you seventeen years ago?" "I never got any letter. I never had one word from you after the Sunday you bade me good-by, promising to write." "And I did write," cried he, passionately. "I posted it with my own hands. You should have got it on the Tuesday morning." She leaned against the laurel bush, that fatal laurel bush, and in a few breathless words told him what David had said about the hidden letter. "It must have been my letter. Why did you not tell me this before?" "How could I? I never knew you had written. You never said a word. In all these years you have never said a single word." Bitterly, bitterly he turned away. The groan that escaped him--a man's groan over his lost life--lost, not wholly through fate alone--was such as she, the woman whose portion had been sorrow, passive sorrow only, never forgot in all her days. "Don't mind it," she whispered--"don't mind it. It is so long past now." He made no immediate answer, then said, "Have you no idea what was in the letter?" "No." "It was to ask you a question, which I had determined not to ask just then, but I changed my mind. The answer, I told you, I should wait for in Edinburgh seven days; after that, I should conclude you meant No, and sail. No answer came, and I sailed." He was silent. So was she. A sense of cruel fatality came over her. Alas! those lost years, that might have been such happy years! At length she said, faintly, "Forget it. It was not your fault." "It was my fault. If not mine, you were still yourself--I ought never to have let you go. I ought to have asked again; to have sought through the whole world till I found you again. And now that I have found you--" "Hush! The girls are here." They came along laughing, that merry group--with whom life was at its spring--who had lost nothing, knew not what it was to lose! "Good-night," said Mr. Roy, hastily. "But--to-morrow morning?" "Yes."