"Weel! weel! When I'm carried to me grave ye'll find the difference, even if ye get a wife. Aye, aye! I ken fine what she'll be like--just one o' the sort wi' a hump somewhere. I kenna whaur the fashion'll put it then, since 'of that hour knoweth no man,' but it will be somewheres, an' her hair will be as if a clucking hen had bin scrapin' in't."
"I deny it; I deny it," laughed Will; "when I marry, I shall marry a girl just like Marjory. Only she shall not be quite so tall, or so clever, and shall be thinner, and less opinionated--more of my sort, and----"
"And her hair shall be of a different colour," laughed Marjory, in her turn; "I'm glad I don't leave you heartbroken--or anyone else, either," she added, half to herself.
And as she passed through her little sitting-room, before starting on her rendezvous with Paul, she paused for an instant before her letter to Tom Kennedy, which still lay unfinished, as she had left it, and looked down again on those last words. They were true still, and with a sudden impulse she took up the pen to say so.
"Tom!" she wrote, "the problem is solved! Paul has come back to me, and we are going to begin a new life together. Yet, I stretch out my hands to you, dear, as I did before, and say 'Friendship is a bigger thing than love!'"
Then she went gaily through the garden to pick a late carnation for Paul's buttonhole, and as she picked it she sang the "Flowers o' the Forest."
"I've seen Tweed's silver streams,
Glittering in the sunny beams,
Grow drumly and dark as he row'd on his way."
The tune, with its haunting cadences, lingered in her mind, and more than once fell from her lips, when with a light heart she faced the ups and downs of the white road as it crept round the loch to where the bridge, spanning the river, would enable her to strike across the moss-hags to the alder-fringed bank above. And Paul would be on the other side as he had been before. But he should not jump this time, for that was one of the things she did not like; those things which she was going to take out of his life and hers. The very thought, indeed, of the risk of a slip made her shiver as she paused for a moment on the bridge, and saw the yellow-brown flood, swollen with the night's rain, rushing against the piers.
"Drumly and dark!" Drumly it was, yet scarcely dark. It ran too fast for that, and up yonder, where she was to meet Paul, it would be a mass of foam with yellow lights in it. A sort of syllabub of a river pouring over the curved edge of the rock heavily. Not like water at all, but like some drugged draught; falling not with a roar or a rush, but with slow, deafening boom. The waters of Lethe might fall so, she fancied. Well! Paul should run no risk of them to-day, for she was before her time, and would be there to warn him. So thinking, she clambered down to the water's edge, and seating herself on the only level slab of rock, which projected slightly over the boiling pool below, she faced the downward course of the river, certain thus of seeing the first glimpse of her lover's tall figure above the bracken which crested the almost perpendicular rocks on the other side.
"I've seen this morning." It was a most distracting tune! All the more so because the words would follow Mrs. Cameron's sentimental lead, instead of keeping to the old lament with the lilt of battle and sudden death in it.