The magic Burgundy was still working wonders; for the moment this old fantastic being had gone back thirty years in geniality, in humanity. “Kiss her, David,” he repeated. The dark and pale face of Sir David, severe yet gentle, bent over Ellinor. Half-laughing, half-startled, yet with a feminine unwillingness to be the one to attach importance to a cousinly greeting, she turned her cheek towards him. But the kiss of the recluse, was—she never knew whether by design or accident—laid slowly upon her half-opened, smiling lips. Had anyone told Ellinor Marvel who, during four years had cried at love and during six years more had railed at it, that her heart would ever be stirred in the old, sweet mad way because of the touch of a man’s lips, she would, in superb security, have scorned the suggestion. Yet now, when she turned away, it was to hide a crimsoning face and a quickening breath. Nay, such a flutter, as of wild birds’ wings, was in her breast, that she vaguely feared it could not escape the notice even of Master Simon’s happy abstractedness. When she again looked at his kinsman, she found that he had been pressed into a chair beside hers; and that her father, with guileless hospitality, was forcing upon his host a glass of his own choice vintage. But, as she looked, she thought she could note a flush, kindred to her own, slowly fading from David’s forehead, and, in the hand he extended passively for the glass, ever so slight a trembling. The next moment she was full of doubt: his reserve seemed complete, his presence almost austere. And she blushed again, for her own blushes. As if to a silent toast, Sir David drained the goblet; then turning his eyes upon her: “You are welcome, Ellinor,” he said. The young widow started at the words, and her discomposure increased. There occurred to her for the first time a sense of the strange position in which she had placed herself; of her impertinence in thus coolly announcing her intention of taking up her residence at Bindon, without even the formality of asking its owner’s leave. But after listening a while to the disjointed conversation that now had become engaged between her father and David, the quaintness and sweetness of the relationship between the two men—the unconscious manner in which such whole-hearted hospitality was bestowed and received without any sense of obligation on one side, or of generosity on the other, struck her deeply, and brought at once a smile to her lips and a mist to her eyes.