Stirred in his soul by the interest she took in him, the great secret of his heart was trembling on his lips, but he repressed it, and a shadow came into his face and a wistfulness into his eyes. 'Prouder would I have been, Miss Graham,' said he, 'if--if--I---- 'What?' 'I had then been known even by name to _you_?' he replied, in a low voice, and with a manner there was no mistaking. Nothing more was said then; yet they both felt, while eye met eye, that their first words of love had been spoken. More might, perhaps, have passed, as the subject could easily have been enlarged on; but just then they were abruptly joined by Allan, who came up at a trot and reined in his horse sharply by their side, with a dark expression on his face, which Eveline thought augured ill for his success with Olive, whom he had suddenly left in the care of Mr. Hawke Holcroft. After quitting the ruins, as Allan rode on by his cousin's side, his memory had gone back to the days when she was a girl of some twelve years or so--a bright-eyed hoyden, who could fish, even take a shot from his gun, climb trees, eat apples right off the branch, play marbles with him, grasp a trout darting in the burn under the long yellow broom or purple brambles, and was his companion in many a ramble and out-door frolic; and now inspired by that memory, the scenery and beauty of the evening, he felt himself disposed to treat with considerable tenderness the lovely girl he hoped to make yet his own. On the other hand, Olive cared little to please him, and for a time she almost repelled, and yet by doing so she greatly lured and attracted him. The friendship of Allan and Olive was a source of some perplexity, if not amusement, to Eveline Graham, but of irritation to her mother, to whom they never seemed to act as lovers at all, unless in 'the Scots fashion' of pouting and quarrelling. To the eyes of all interested in the matter, it did not seem that she cared for him in the least. She never altered a plan or hastened her pace to meet him, or go where he might chance to be--in the library, on the terrace smoking, or in any of the quaint corridors that traversed the old house. She never adopted a dress, a ribbon, or ornament to please his eye, though she sometimes did, coquettishly, he thought, to flatter Hawke Holcroft; and even now, as they were slowly traversing the dark, woody dell of the legend--the _Coire-nan-Uriskin_--she was humming, half in warning, half in waggery, Tennyson's song: 'She can both false and friendly be, Beware! beware! Trust her not, she is fooling thee!' And yet, as she glanced at her soldierly cousin from time to time under her long, dark lashes, she thought that, though he looked stately in the kilt, he seldom looked better than now when in riding costume, with the smartest of light grey cover coats. The girl's mind vibrated curiously between her over-sensitive pride, her wishes, her doubts, and half convictions.