I should have had it always to myself but for one person--Isobel Fortune from the Kirkillstane. She seemed as little pleased to meet me there as I was to meet her, though we had been brought up in the same school together; and when I would come suddenly round a bend of the road and she appeared a hundred yards off, I noticed that she half stopped and seemed, as it were, to swither whether she should not turn and avoid me. It would not have surprised me had she done so, for, to tell the truth, I was no very cheery object to contemplate upon a pleasant highway, with the bawbee frown of a poetic gloom upon my countenance and the most curt of salutations as I passed. What she did there all her lone so often mildly puzzled me, till I concluded she was on a tryst with some young gentleman of the neighbourhood; but as I never saw sign of him, I did not think myself so much the marplot as to feel bound to take another road for my rambling. I was all the surer 'twas a lover she was out to meet, because she reddened guiltily each time that we encountered (a fine and sudden charm to a countenance very striking and beautiful, as I could not but observe even then when weightier affairs engaged me); but it seemed I was all in error, for long after she maintained she was, like myself, indulging a sentimental humour that she found go very well in tune with the noise of Earn Water. As it was her habit to be busily reading when we thus met, I had little doubt as to the ownership of a book that one afternoon I found on the road not long after passing her. It was--of all things in the world!--Hervey's “Meditations.” “It's an odd graveyard taste for a lass of that stamp,” thought I, hastening back after her to restore the book, and when I came up to her she was--not red this time, but wan to the very lips, and otherwise in such confusion that she seemed to tremble upon her legs, “I think this is yours, Isobel,” says I: we were too well acquaint from childhood for any address more formal. “Oh, thank you, Paul,” said she hastily. “How stupid of me to lose it!” She took it from me; her eye fell (for the first time, I felt sure) upon the title of the volume, and she bit her lip in a vexation. I was all the more convinced that her book was but a blind in her rambles, and that there was a lover somewhere; and I think I must have relaxed my silly black frown a little, and my proud melancholy permitted a faint smile of amusement. The flag came to her face then.