"Then," replied Ralph, "if it be indeed my own self I see in your eyes, it is myself as God made me at first without sin. I do not feel at all like a cherub now, but I must have been once, if I ever was like what I see in your eyes."
"Now go on; tell me what else you see," said Winsome.
"Your lips--" began Ralph, and paused.
"No, six is quite enough," said Winsome, after a little while, mysteriously. She had only two, and Ralph only two; yet she said with little grammar and no sense at all, "Six is enough."
But a voice from quite other lips came over the rising background of scrub and tangled thicket.
"Gang on coortin'," it said; "I'm no lookin', an' I canna see onything onyway."
It was Jock Gordon. He continued: "Jock Scott's gane hame till his breakfast. He'll no bother ye this mornin', sae coort awa'."
CHAPTEE XXXV.
SUCH SWEET SORROW.
WINSOME and Ralph laughed, but Winsome sat up and put straight her sunbonnet. Sunbonnets are troublesome things. They will not stick on one's head. Manse Bell contradicts this. She says that her sunbonnet never comes off, or gets pushed back. As for other people's, lasses are not what they were in her young days.
"I must go home," said Winsome; "they will miss me."
"You know that it is 'good-bye,' then," said Ralph.
"What!" said Winsome, "shall I not see you to-morrow?" the bright light of gladness dying out of her eye. And the smile drained down out of her cheek like the last sand out of the sand-glass.
"No," said Ralph quietly, keeping his eyes full on hers, "I cannot go back to the manse after what was said. It is not likely that I shall ever be there again."
"Then when shall I see you?" said Winsome piteously. It is the cry of all loving womanhood, whose love goes out to the battle or into the city, to the business of war, or pleasure, or even of money- getting. "Then when shall I see you. again?" said Winsome, saying a new thing. There is nothing new under the sun, yet to lovers like Winsome and Ralph all things are new.
There was a catch in her throat. A salter dew gathered about her eyes, and the pupils expanded till the black seemed to shut out the blue.
Very tenderly Ralph looked down, and said, "Winsome, my dear, very soon I shall come again with more to ask and more to tell."
"But you are not going straight away to Edinburgh now? You must get a drive to Dumfries and take the Edinburgh coach."