Her _naïve_ conviction that a man who had always been adamant to her own charms must necessarily remain so to those of everyone else continued perfectly unshaken. Whether, under any circumstances, she could have believed Herries capable of being in love is very doubtful. But at present the distorting veil of her own half-guilty passion was drawn across her eyes, and she saw nothing. ’Are you never alone?’ Herries said fretfully to Alison once, after a singularly irksome visit shared with Nancy and Willy. ’Not very often, sir,’ said Alison; and then she added, with a little hesitation, shyly, ’There are Tuesday and Thursday evenings, now, when Nancy goes to hear Mr. Kemp lecture on a missionary project, and I—I do not go, because ’tis Willy’s history nights, and I help him with his lessons.’ ’Then I’ll come those nights, of course!’ cried Herries. ’But then, drat him, there will always be the boy!’ ’I can sometimes put him to Jean in the kitchen with his book,’ said Alison, demurely, and a dimple suddenly showed in one cheek, which Herries had never noticed before. Jean, in these days, was a great ally of Alison’s, and if she saw more than she was meant to see in Herries’s visits, she kept her honest counsel. So Herries came always on these evenings when the exemplary Nancy, who was in her own peculiar fashion extremely pious, attended the lucubrations of her favourite divine. Those were sweet hours to the harassed man, and I do not say they were the less sweet for being stolen. He could lay aside for a brief space the stern responsibilities of the life he took so hardly—let his brain rest, and his heart speak. The little parlour would be, in the twilight of the lengthening evenings, lit only by the firelight and the dying day. If Herries called himself a cold or backward lover, not so, in those dear hours, did Alison find him. ’Ally,’ he said one night, ’this secrecy cannot go on for ever, though just now it is conformable enough to my affairs. When shall it end?’ ’When I go home, sir, perhaps,’ said Alison, timidly. ’Then, when you go home, I come too,’ said Herries, softly, ’and make formal propositions to the laird of The Mains for the hand of his eldest daughter?’ ’Yes, sir,’ said Alison, with shining eyes. They shone because they saw so fair a vision—her happy self returning to her old home, and with her, this true, this gallant lover. She saw the low, old house—the dear, humble rooms of her childhood—her father’s face—her sisters crowding round her. Oh! proud the moment when she should show this ’braw wooer’ of her own to the mother who would have had her tie herself to Mr. Cheape! Our good Alison was all a woman here, and sweet was the foretaste of a woman’s triumph. ’Let it be very soon,’ Herries whispered, his lips among the curls at her ear; ’whenever this accursed press of business is over, the sooner the better for me.’ ’Whenever Nancy can spare me, sir,’ said Alison.