’Herries!’ exclaimed Nancy, indignantly, ’you heard him! And pray, did you ever hear anything so intolerant—so insufferably unjust, in your life? Because, forsooth, a man is not cut precisely after his own pattern—cold, bloodless, passionless, like himself—Herries condemns him! He will make no allowance for a nature different to his own—subject to temptations which never assail him, and the sport of circumstances whose difficulty he has no idea of. Herries, indeed! Ally, if life were as Herries would make it, ’twould be a desert, and I’d die of thirst. But, Heaven be thanked, though I depend upon him in a measure, and must therefore obey him in many outward things, he cannot bind my soul! That is free—to take its own flights—to seek its own companion in a kindred spirit, which understands it, and whom it understands.’ Sleepy Alison did not pause to enquire whether this was merely a poetical generalisation, or whether the ’kindred spirit’ were Mr. Burns. She looked gently and patiently—a little wonderingly, perhaps, at the fretted, passion-tossed little creature at her side. ’Come to bed, Nancy,’ she whispered persuasively, as to an excited child. ’’Tis so late, dear—long, long past one of the clock.’ ’To bed!’ exclaimed Nancy. ’And who could sleep, after such an evening as I have spent? But, of course, I’ll come, love. ’Tis a world of prose, and one must eat and sleep, as though poesy were not. But, Ally’—she crept close to the girl, and whispered at her ear with flushed face, and brightening eyes—’Ally, he is coming here!’ ’Who?’ said Alison, a little startled. ’The—the poet?’ ’Ay, child,’ said Nancy, ’the bard. He’s to honour my poor hovel with his presence. Think of it! And you will see him, Ally—ay—and hear him. For don’t suppose that I forgot my Ally in my raptures. I said to him, "I have a song-bird, sir, up in my eyrie, whose wood-note wild will delight you." You remember how I told you, Ally, he delights in a voice to sing over to him the old country airs and catches, and this he told me himself to-night. So you must be in song, sweetest—when he comes, in a day or two—and we will tune the old harp, and have a heavenly evening with the Muses.’ This, surely, was a prospect to delight any girl, and fill her brain with dreams. But Alison, as she went to bed that night (prosaic girl—I grieve to state it of a heroine), never thought of the honour in store for her. In the first place, she was sleepy, and in the second—well, in the second, her thoughts seemed inclined to stay elsewhere. There flickered before her eyes—it would come—the most teasing, tantalising little picture—the cameo-like outline of a profile, virile though delicate—and oh, so dreadfully severe; the steely penetration of cold, cold blue eyes; the lines of a figure that held Danny on its knee, and had Willy leaning heavily against its shoulder. And the following, or something like it, was Miss Graham’s last waking thought that night.