Thenceforward Eric Marshall was a constant visitor at the Gordon homestead. He soon became a favourite with Thomas and Janet, especially the latter. He liked them both, discovering under all their outward worth and fitness of character. Thomas Gordon was surprisingly well read and could floor Eric any time in argument, once he became warmed up to of words. Eric hardly recognized him the first time he saw him thus . His form straightened, his sunken eyes flashed, his face flushed, his voice rang like a , and he poured out a flood of which swept Eric’s smart, up-to-date arguments away like straws in the rush of a mountain . Eric enjoyed his own defeat enormously, but Thomas Gordon was ashamed of being thus out of himself, and for a week afterwards confined his remarks to “Yes” and “No,” or, at the outside, to a brief statement that a change in the weather was .  
Janet never talked on matters of church and state; such she plainly considered to be far beyond a woman’s province. But she listened with interest in her eyes while Thomas and Eric on each other with facts and statistics and opinions, and on the rare occasions when Eric scored a point she permitted herself a sly little smile at her brother’s expense.
 
Of Neil, Eric saw but little. The Italian boy avoided him, or if they chanced to meet passed him by with , downcast eyes. Eric did not trouble himself greatly about Neil; but Thomas Gordon, understanding the which had led Neil to betray his discovery of the , bluntly told Kilmeny that she must not make such an equal of Neil as she had done.
 
“You have been too kind to the lad, lassie, and he’s got . He must be taught his place. I mistrust we have all made more of him than we should.”
 
But most of the hours of Eric’s wooing were spent in the old orchard; the garden end of it was now a of roses—roses red as the heart of a sunset, roses pink as the early flush of dawn, roses white as the snows on mountain peaks, roses full blown, and roses in buds that were sweeter than anything on earth except Kilmeny’s face. Their fell in silken heaps along the old paths or clung to the lush grasses among which Eric lay and dreamed, while Kilmeny played to him on her violin.
 
Eric promised himself that when she was his wife her wonderful gift for music should be cultivated to the utmost. Her powers of expression seemed to deepen and develop every day, growing as her soul grew, taking on new colour and richness from her heart.
 
To Eric, the days were all pages in an inspired idyl. He had never dreamed that love could be so or the world so beautiful. He wondered if the universe were big enough to hold his joy or long enough to live it out. His whole existence was, for the time being, bounded by that orchard where he wooed his sweetheart. All other ambitions and plans and hopes were set aside in the pursuit of this one aim, the of which would enhance all others a thousand-fold, the loss of which would rob all others of their reason for existence. His own world seemed very far away and the things of that world forgotten.
 
His father, on hearing that he had taken the Lindsay school for a year, had written him a , amazed letter, asking him if he were demented.
 
“Or is there a girl in the case?” he wrote. “There must be, to tie you down to a place like Lindsay for a year. Take care, master Eric; you’ve been too sensible all your life. A man is bound to make a fool of himself at least once, and when you didn’t get through with that in your teens it may be attacking you now.”
 
David also wrote, expostulating more gravely; but he did not express the suspicions Eric knew he must entertain.
 
“Good old David! He is quaking with fear that I am up to something he can’t approve of, but he won’t say a word by way of attempting to force my confidence.”
 
It could not long remain a secret in Lindsay that “the Master” was going to the Gordon place on courting thoughts intent. Mrs. Williamson kept her own and Eric’s counsel; the Gordons said nothing; but the secret leaked out and great was the surprise and gossip and wonder. One or two incautious people ventured to express their opinion of the Master’s wisdom to the Master himself; but they never repeated the experiment. Curiosity was . A hundred stories were circulated about Kilmeny, all greatly exaggerated in the circulation. Wise heads were shaken and the majority opined that it was a great pity. The Master was a likely young fellow; he could have his pick of almost anybody, you might think; it was too bad that he should go and take up with that queer, dumb niece of the Gordons who had been brought up in such a heathenish way. But then you never could guess what way a man’s fancy would jump when he set out to pick him a wife. They guessed Neil Gordon didn’t like it much. He seemed to have got dreadful and sulky of late and wouldn’t sing in the any more. Thus the buzz of comment and gossip ran.
 
To those two in the old orchard it mattered not a . Kilmeny knew nothing of gossip. To her, Lindsay was as much of an unknown world as the city of Eric’s home. Her thoughts strayed far and wide in the realm of her fancy, but they never wandered out to the little realities that hedged her strange life around. In that life she had blossomed out, a fair, unique thing. There were times when Eric almost regretted that one day he must take her out of her white to a world that, in the last analysis, was only Lindsay on a larger scale, with just the same pettiness of thought and feeling and opinion at the bottom of it. He wished he might keep her to himself for ever, in that old, spruce-hidden orchard where the roses fell.
 
One day he indulged himself in the fulfillment of the he had formed when Kilmeny had told him she thought herself ugly. He went to Janet and asked her permission to bring a mirror to the house that he might have the privilege of being the first to reveal Kilmeny to herself . Janet was somewhat at first.
 
“There hasn’t been such a thing in the house for sixteen years, Master. There never was but three—one in the spare room, and a little one in the kitchen, and Margaret’s own. She broke them all the day it first struck her that Kilmeny was going to be bonny. I might have got one after she died maybe. But I didn’t think of it; and there’s no need of lasses to be always prinking at their looking glasses.”
 
But Eric pleaded and argued , and finally Janet said,
 
“Well, well, have your own way. You’d have it anyway I think, lad. You are one of those men who always get their own way. But that is different from the men who TAKE their own way—and that’s a mercy,” she added under her breath.
 
Eric went to town the next Saturday and picked out a mirror that pleased him. He had it shipped to Radnor and Thomas Gordon brought it home, not knowing what it was, for Janet had thought it just as well he should not know.
 
“It’s a present the Master is making Kilmeny,” she told him.
 
She sent Kilmeny off to the orchard after tea, and Eric slipped around to the house by way of the main road and lane. He and Janet together the mirror and hung it on the parlour wall.
 
“I never saw such a big one, Master,” said Janet rather doubtfully, as if, after all, she distrusted its gleaming, pearly depth and richly frame. “I hope it won’t make her vain. She is very bonny, but it may not do her any good to know it.”
 
“It won’t harm her,” said Eric confidently. “When a belief in her ugliness hasn’t spoiled a girl a belief in her beauty won’t.”
 
But Janet did not understand epigrams. She carefully removed a little dust from the polished surface, and frowned at the by no means beautiful reflection she saw therein.
 
“I cannot think what made Kilmeny suppose she was ugly, Master.”
 
“Her mother told her she was,” said Eric, rather bitterly.
 
“Ah!” Janet shot a quick glance at the picture of her sister. “Was that it? Margaret was a strange woman, Master. I suppose she thought her own beauty had been a to her. She WAS bonny. That picture doesn’t do her justice. I never liked it. It was taken before she was—before she met Ronald Fraser. We none of us thought it very like her at the time. But, Master, three years later it was like her—oh, it was like her then! That very look came in her face.”
 
“Kilmeny doesn’t resemble her mother,” remarked Eric, glancing at the picture w............