’We have not done the half that I intended,’ said Herries, seriously. He had planned a day, it was now barely noon, and he liked to keep to a plan. It needed only a very little of Nancy’s deft management to enforce her own suggestion. A coach was called, and she was put into it; it rumbled off, and she nodded and smiled and waved her hand to the couple whom she left standing in the palace-yard. ’There, now,’ she said to herself, with a sigh of thankfulness and relief, ’what a most admirable idea! With any other man ’twould not have done, I could not have left the child; but with Archie, the very thing! He’ll be quite happy schooling her for another hour and bring her home safe as a church, and she, dear innocent, will never know how dull she’s been.... And now, my soul, to other thoughts!’ And before Potterrow was reached, ’Clarinda’s’ next letter to ’Sylvander’ was all aflame, written on that busy, burning little brain. *CHAPTER XIX.* ’Shall we dine?’ Herries said, suddenly. On leaving Holyrood they had taken a short walk in the King’s Park, in order that Alison might admire the crags. Returning to the town they had hunted amid devious ways for a certain ancient church, and here in the graveyard, among the lank, decaying grass, the slanting tombs and fallen emblems of mortality, Herries had pointed out the blackened, mouldering slab which marks the grave of Rizzio. Then they had come up the High Street to St. Giles, and had made an exhaustive survey of that interesting edifice. And now they had climbed up the Castle-walk, and stood upon that wondrous summit, the rock that crowns the northern capital. It was here, perhaps, that the faintest shadow of a lessened alacrity had fallen across Alison’s manner, when invited to scale a bastion and visit a most interesting gun there situate. ’Are you hungry?’ Herries had enquired. ’Very,’ said poor Alison, and then could have bitten her tongue out for making an admission at that day considered so very ungenteel. But, indeed, it was now long since breakfast time, and a sup of the boys’ porridge at half-past eight, and a hunk of their bread, although a nutritive, was not a very lasting, meal. Healthy Alison was indeed hungry, and Herries’s ’Shall we dine?’ had a most tempting sound. ’Your cousin will be expecting me, sir,’ she demurred, as in duty bound. ’Oh, Nancy dines at mid-day with the boys, I know,’ said Herries, ’and that’s two hours and more a-gone. ’Tis not a fashionable hour to ask a lady to take dinner. But we’ve deserved it—so let us dine.’