“And neither shall I forget, my little Lily!” he cried. He too was nervous and tremulous with excitement and fatigue. He stooped towards her, holding her hands. “Give me a kiss, Lily, and I will never forget.” The day before she would not have thought much of that infantile salutation--and she put up her soft cheek readily enough, with the child’s simple habit; but when the two faces touched, a flood of colour came over both, scorching Lilias, as it seemed, with a sense of shame which bewildered her, which she did not understand. She drew back hastily, with a sudden cry. Sympathy, or some other feeling still more subtle and incomprehensible, made Geoff’s young countenance flame too. He looked at her with a tenderness that brought the tears to his eyes. “You are only a child,” he said, hastily, apologetically; “and I suppose I am not much more, as people say,” he added, with a little broken laugh. Then, after a pause--“But, Lily, we will never forget that we have met this morning; and what one of us does will be for both of us; and you will always think of me as I shall always think of you. Is it a bargain, Lily?” “Always!” said the little girl, very solemnly; and she gave him her hand again which she had drawn away, and her other cheek; and this time the kiss got accomplished solemnly, as if it had been a religious ceremony on both sides--which indeed, perhaps, in one way or another it was. When Geoff felt himself carried rapidly, after this, behind a fresh country horse, with the inquisitive ruddy countenance of Robert Gill from the “Penninghame Arms” by his side, along the margin of Penninghame Water towards his home, there was a thrill and tremor in him which he could not quite account for. By the time he had got half way home, however, he had begun to believe that the tremor meant nothing more than a nervous uncertainty as to how he should get into Stanton, and in what state of abject terror he might find his mother. Even to his own unsophisticated mind, the idea of being out all night had an alarming and disreputable sound; and probably Lady Stanton had been devoured by all manner of terrors. The perfectly calm aspect of the house, however, comforted Geoff; no one seemed stirring, except in the lower regions, where the humblest of its inhabitants--the servants’ servants--were preparing for their superiors. Geoff dismissed his dog-cart outside the gates, leaving upon the mind of Robert Gill a very strong certainty that the young lord was “a wild one, like them that went before him,” and had been upon “no good gait.” “Folks don’t stay out all night, and creep into th’ house through a side door as quiet as pussy, for good,” said the rural sage, with perfect reasonableness.