Nevertheless, I saw for the first time all that was between them. So with no more said, Kate fled fleet-foot down the path towards the great house, which we could see standing grey and massive at the end of the avenue of beeches. "There's a lass by yon burnside that will do as muckle for you; but dinna bide to speer her leave!" she cried to me over her shoulder, a word which it was hard to understand. I asked Wat, who stood staring after her in a kind of wrapt adoration, what she could mean. He gazed at me, as if he did not see what kind of animal was making the noise like talking. I am sure that for the time he knew me not from John Knox. "What did she mean?" I asked him. "Mean!" said he, "mean----" speaking vaguely as one in a swither. "You are heady and moidered with not getting a kiss from a lass," said I, with, I grant, some little spite. "Did she ever kiss you?" cried he, looking truculently at me. "Nay!" said I bluntly, for indeed the thing was not in my thought. "Then you ken naught about it. You had better hold your wheesht!" He stood so long thinking, sometimes giving his thigh a little slap, like one that has suddenly remembered something pleasant which he had forgotten, that I was near coming away in disgust and leaving the fool, when I remembered that I knew not where to go. In a while he came to himself somewhat, and I told him what Kate McGhie had said to me over her shoulder. "Did Kate say that?" he cried. "She could surely not have said all that and I not hear her." "Out, you fool," I said, for so of custom I spoke to him, being my cousin and playmate. "You had other matter to think of. Say it she did." He repeated the words which I told him, and I declare even the sound of them seemed to be in danger of throwing him into another rhapsody. But at last he said, suddenly, "Oh, I ken what she means----" And he drew a long breath. "I suppose we had better go down to the water-side. She will not come out again, if we wait all night." And he went some way along the avenue and looked long and hard at one heavy-browed window of the old house which seemed to be winking at us. It is a strange thing how love affects different people. You never can tell beforehand how it will be. I could not have believed that the presence of a forward lass with black eyebrows could have made a moonstruck fool of Wildcat Wat of Lochinvar. He still stood and looked at the window till my patience was ended. "Come on, man," I cried. "I declare you are not Heather Jock, as she called you, but Heather Jackass!" At another time he would have knocked my head off, but now my jesting affected him no more than a sermon. And this I took to be the worst sign of all. "Well, come on then," he said. "You are surely in an accursed sweat of haste to-night!"