Margaret, crimson to the hair, and feeling herself the most gawky, the most awkward, the most foolish of distressed damsels, her ungloved hand all torn and pricked with the thorns of the branch which she had caught at, her foot held fast in the tenacious clay, did not know what kind of hoyden, what rude village girl, red and blowzy, she must have looked to the stranger. She looked a nymph out of the poetic woods, a creature out of the poets, a celestial vision to him. He sprang forward, his heart beating, to offer his hand and his assistance. Was it his fault? He feared it was his fault; he had startled her, moving just when she was in the act of crossing the plank. He made her a thousand apologies. It was all his doing; he hoped she would forgive him. He expended himself so in apologies that Margaret felt it necessary to apologize too. “It was me that was silly,” she said. “Generally, I never mind a sudden sound. What should it matter? Nobody would do me harm, and there’s no wild beasts, that I should be so silly. Oh, it’s nothing; and it was all my fault.” “You are the queen in your own country. There should be nothing in your path to startle you.” “Oh no, I’m not the queen,” said Margaret, laughing. “I have to take my chance like other folk. You are a stranger here,” she said, with friendly innocence. The fact that she was, if not the queen, as she said, yet at least a princess, the first young lady hereabouts, and known to everybody as such, made her friendly and made her bold. Supremacy has many agreeable accessories. The young man, who had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, half in respect, half in awkwardness, here blushed more deeply than she had done when she saw him first. “I am not a stranger, Miss Margaret. I am Robert Glen, whom you used to play with when you were a little girl; but I cannot expect you to remember me, for I have been long away.” “Oh, Rob!” she cried. Margaret was delighted. The vivid color came flushing back to her cheeks out of pure pleasure. She held out her hand to him. He had not been so respectful when they had parted, which was ten years ago. “Indeed, I mind you quite well, though I should not have known you after all this long time; but how did you know me?” “The first moment I saw you,” he said, “and there is nothing wonderful in that. There are many like me, but only one Miss Margaret, here or anywhere else.” The last words he murmured in an undertone, but Margaret made them out. She laughed, not in ridicule, but in pleasure, just touched with amusement. How funny to see him again, and that he should know her; and still more funny, though not disagreeable, that he should speak to her so. “I was vexed,” she said, “very vexed that a stranger should see me so, my shoe all dirty and my hand all torn--it looked so strange; but I am not vexed now, since it is only you, and not a stranger. Just look at me--such a figure! and what will Bell say?” “You have still Bell?”