‘I don’t think you know what love means,’ said Horace: ‘it is to give up all for one; it is to forsake father and mother--and your past life--and your prospects, as people call them--and good sense and caution and prudence, and all your Scotch qualities;--that is what love is, Isabel; to think of nobody, and care for nobody, but one; to give all your heart, and not a bit of it. I don’t ask you for a bit of it; I want you all--every thought, every feeling. I want you to give up everybody and come to me--to me!’ and here the young man opened his arms and turned to her with a look of passion which startled the girl. She made a sudden sidelong step beyond one of the great heather clumps before she answered. The colour changed from red to pale on her face; but she kept her eyes fixed on him, with a look of eagerness and wistfulness, trying to penetrate beneath the surface and see his heart. ‘Horace,’ she said, softly, ‘you and me are different--a man and a girl are different, I suppose. That is not what it is to me. It is something that makes life better, and stronger, and sweeter. I’m fonder of Margaret, I’m better to the bairns. Don’t turn away like that. It is like wine,’ cried the girl, with light rising in her eyes; ‘it gives you strength for all you have to do. You’re at your work, you’re minding your house, you’re vexed and wearied and troubled--and lo, you give a glance out of the window, and you see _him_ pass, and all your trouble rolls away! That’s love to me. When you turn round and give me a smile, it’s like wine,’ cried Isabel once more; ‘I feel it all about my heart--I go back to my work, and something sings within me. I am neither tired nor troubled more. That’s love to me! And the world’s bonnier and the sky’s brighter,’ she went on faltering, ‘Oh, Horace, surely you know what I mean?’ ‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ cried the young man, with a kind of brutality. ‘I never understand your Scotch. If this is the sort of figure I am to cut, making you devote yourself more to Margaret and the bairns, as you call them, I had better take myself off, it would seem. A fellow is not to lose the best days of his life for such a reward as that.’ Isabel looked at him with but partial comprehension; her point of view was more elevated than his, but yet it was limited, like his, to her own side of the question. She looked at his clouded brow and averted face with a woman’s first violent effort to enter into a state of feeling which was the antipodes of her own. Slowly it dawned upon her that it might be as just as her own though so different. She clasped her arms round the slender white stem of a young birch-tree, and leant against it, gazing at her lover with dreamy eyes.