"I am far from believing," he said, "that genius is a thing which rightly belongs to women. 'Tis to me but an issue on one side. And the woman who has enough of her husband's kisses and his babies at her breast has little time to write verses or think of other men."
With these words still ringing in my ears I rapped at Nancy's door on my way to bed, to find her sitting by a glaring light with the everlasting Burns book in her hand. I was a bit dashed in spirit by her occupation, for it seemed unnatural that a girl should be spending the time immediately after her betrothal in such an employ, and I affected a gaiety I was far from feeling.
"Is it to Nancy Stair or the possible Countess of Glenmore that I speak?"
She stood by the table, her finger still marking her place in the book.
"Dandy told you, then?" she asked.
"Told us!" I echoed. "It's my opinion he'll tell the town-crier to-night and have it in all the prints of the realm within the week."
"He told you just what the understanding was?"
I repeated what he had said, and she nodded at the end in acquiescence.
"You see," she said, coming toward me and putting her head on my shoulder, "I'm not sure of myself. My mind's ill redd up for marriage with any one. I've had too much freedom, perhaps; and while one side of my nature, probably the strongest one, loves Danvers Carmichael, I am drawn to the writer of these lines, this Burns man, in a way I can not tell; and at the very foot of the matter I am mightily taken up with the power of John Montrose. It's no highly moral, is it?" she asked, with an amused smile, "to feel ye could be in love with two—three men at once? But my nature's many sided, and on one of these sides I find a most 'treacherous inclination' toward his Grace of Borthwicke."