That was all he knew, and there was the sting of injustice in this present intrusion in the Scottish glen, hallowed by the delights of a young love which boy and girl had arranged should shake the world into a wonder at its glory. A sordid family history was a clog upon romance, and our young man was that earnest creature, a romantic. A stolen love, for she lived at the great house taken by her father for the sport of the autumn months, and he was staying with his great-aunt Janet, an ex-governess, in the village, as he had done ever since he was eleven, for his holidays. Now he was nearly twenty, wonderfully in love, punctual to his appointment, striving for romantic thoughts and able to achieve nothing but these humiliating memories of his father. He tried singing; that was of no avail. It did but call to mind his father's songs. He threw pebbles into the burn, but they gave him no amusement. Then from his pocket he drew an anthology of love--poems from which he had been accustomed to read to his fair--and so he lulled himself to something near the warm mood of expectancy and began to tell himself that she was very late, that she had failed him on this their last day. There was a sort of sweet anguish in the disappointment which he liked so much that he was almost put out when she came. He leaped to his feet and opened his arms and she sank into them, and an enchantment descended upon them and they kissed. He had prepared for her a couch of bracken. On this they lay and kissed again. This kiss was tragic. The enchantment broke in the middle, and he found the proximity of her face ridiculous and embarrassing and his position uncomfortable. He did not tell her so, and a simulated rapture hid his feelings from her. She sighed: "Oh, René!" The sound of his name on her lips never failed to move him, and a little of the enchantment returned. He could endure her nearness, and gave her an affectionate little hug quite genuinely warm. It surprised her into happy laughter. "Oh, René! it has been more beautiful this year even than last. Of course we're older. Do you think it goes on for ever and ever, year after year, growing more and more beautiful?" "Very few lovers----" began René in a solemn voice, but at once the generalization offended him and he never reached his predicate. The subject seemed entirely to satisfy Cathleen. She took his hand in hers: "We mustn't stop writing to each other again." "It was you who stopped." "I thought----" "It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean--I mean I don't know what your life is like." "You know I shall never find anyone like you, René, never."