He reined Kelpie back, and as she passed on, his eyes caught a glimmer of emotion in Clementina’s. He fell behind, and all that day did not come near her again. Florimel asked her what he had been saying, and she compelled herself to repeat a part of it. “He is always saying such odd out-of-the-way things!” remarked Florimel. “I used sometimes, like you, to fancy him a little astray, but I soon found I was wrong. I wish you could have heard him tell a story he once told my father and me. It was one of the wildest you ever heard. I can’t tell to this day whether he believed it himself or not. He told it quite as if he did.” “Could you not make him tell it again, as we ride along? It would shorten the way.” “Do you want the way shortened?--I don’t. But indeed it would not do to tell it so. It ought to be heard just where I heard it--at the foot of the ruined castle where the dreadful things in it took place. You must come and see me at Lossie House in the autumn, and then he shall tell it you. Besides, it ought to be told in Scotch, and there you will soon learn enough to follow it: half the charm depends on that.” Although Malcolm did not again approach Clementina that day, he watched almost her every motion as she rode. Her lithe graceful back and shoulders--for she was a rebel against the fashion of the day in dress as well as in morals, and, believing in the natural stay of the muscles, had found them responsive to her trust-- the noble poise of her head, and the motions of her arms, easy yet decided, were ever present to him, though sometimes he could hardly have told whether his sight or his mind--now in the radiance of the sun, now in the shadow of the wood, now against the green of the meadow, now against the blue of the sky, and now in the faint moonlight, through which he followed, as a ghost in the realms of Hades might follow the ever flitting phantom of his love. Day glided after day. Adventure came not near them. Soft and lovely as a dream the morning dawned, the noon flowed past, the evening came and the death that followed was yet sweeter than the life that had gone before. Through it all, day-dream and nightly trance, radiant air and moony mist, before him glode the shape of Clementina, its every motion a charm. After that shape he could have been content, oh, how content! to ride on and on through the ever unfolding vistas of an eternal succession. Occasionally his mistress would call him to her, and then he would have one glance of the day-side of the wondrous world he had been following. Somewhere within it must be the word of the living One. Little he thought that all the time she was thinking more of him who had spoken that word in her hearing. That he was the object of her thoughts not a suspicion crossed the mind of the simple youth. How could he imagine a lady like her taking a fancy to what, for all his marquisate, he was still in his own eyes, a raw young fisherman,