Had I let him go, here would have been the end of his love story, but that piteous smile unmanned me, and I could not keep the words back. "She is in Nanny's house," I cried. In another moment these two were together for weal or woe, and I had set off dizzily for the school-house, feeling now that I had been false to Margaret, and again exulting in what I had done. By and by the bell stopped, and Gavin and Babbie regarded it as little as I heeded the burns now crossing the glen road noisily at places that had been dry two hours before. CHAPTER XXIX. STORY OF THE EGYPTIAN. God gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should dare to ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after saying "Thank God" so curtly that it is only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again within the hour. Gavin was to be satisfied if he were told that no evil had befallen her he loved, and all the way between the school-house and Windyghoul Babbie craved for no more than Gavin's life. Now they had got their desires; but do you think they were content? The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard Gavin speak of her. It was her way of preventing herself from running to him. Then, when she thought him gone, he opened the door. She rose and shrank back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad cry. His disappointed arms met on nothing. "You, too, heard that I was dead?" he said, thinking her strangeness but grief too sharply turned to joy. There were tears in the word with which she answered him, and he would have kissed her, but she defended her face with her hand. "Babbie," he asked, beginning to fear that he had not sounded her deepest woe, "why have you left me all this time? You are not glad to see me now?" "I was glad," she answered in a low voice, "to see you from the window, but I prayed to God not to let you see me." She even pulled away her hand when he would have taken it. "No, no, I am to tell you everything now, and then--" "Say that you love me first," he broke in, when a sob checked her speaking. "No," she said, "I must tell you first what I have done, and then you will not ask me to say that. I am not a gypsy." "What of that?" cried Gavin. "It was not because you were a gypsy that I loved you." "That is the last time you will say you love me," said Babbie. "Mr. Dishart, I am to be married to-morrow." She stopped, afraid to say more lest he should fall, but except that his arms twitched he did not move. "I am to be married to Lord Rintoul," she went on. "Now you know who I am."