“It was you that began,” said Rodie, with some justice. They had by this time reached the summer-house, with its thick background of lilac bushes. The bay lay before them, in all that softened splendour of the Sabbath morning, concerning which so many of us hold the fond tradition that in its lustre and its glory there is something distinct from all other days. The Forfarshire coast lay dim and fair in a little morning haze, on the other side of the blue and tranquil sea, with faint lines of yellow sand, and here and there a white edge of foam, though all was so still, lighting up the distance. The hills, all soft with light and shadow, every knowe and howe visible under the caress of the mild and broad sunshine, the higher rocks upon the near shore half-draped with the intense greenery of the delicate sea-weed, the low reefs, lying dark in leathery clothing of dulse, like the teeth of some great sea monster, half hidden in the ripples of the water, the horizon to the east softening off into a vague radiance of infinity in the great breadth of the German Ocean. I have always thought and often said, that if there is a spot on earth in which one can feel the movement of the great round world through space, though reduced by human limitations to a faint rhythm and swaying, it is there under the illimitable blue of the northern sky, on the shores and links of St. Rule’s. The pair who came thus suddenly in sight of this landscape, were not of any sentimental turn, and were deeply engaged in their own immediate sensations; but the girl paused to cry, “Oh, how bonnie, how bonnie!” while the boy sat down on the rough seat, and dug his heels into the grass, expecting an ordeal of questioning and “bothering,” in which the sky and the sea could give him but little help. Elsie was much of the mind of the jilted and forsaken everywhere. She could not keep herself from reproaches, sometimes from taunts. But the sky and sea did help Rodie after all, for they brought her back by the charm of their aspect, an effect more natural at sixteen than at fifteen, and to a girl rather than a boy. “I am not wanting to quarrel, and it’s a shame and a sin on the Sabbath, and such a bonnie day as this. Oh, but it’s a bonnie day! there is the wee light-house that is like a glow-worm at night; it is nothing but a white line now, as thin as an end of thread: and muckle Dundee nothing but a little smoke hanging above the Law----” “I suppose,” said Rodie, scornfully, “you have seen them all before?” “Oh, yes, I have seen them all before: but that is not to say that they are not sometimes bonnier at one time than another. Rodie, you and me that are brother and sister, we never should be anything less than dear friends.” “Friends enough,” said Rodie, sulkily. “I am wanting nothing but just that you’ll let me be.”