'Oh, don't you know?' said she, with her grating little laugh, 'Babiole's in love!'

'In love!' said I slowly. 'A child like that!'

'Oh, it's not a first attachment by any means,' said she, making merry over my surprise, as she swung her little watering-pot with one hand, and put her head on one side to admire a row of handsome gladioluses which she had reared with some care. 'Her first, what you may call serious passion, was at seven years old, two whole years later than my earliest love. By the bye, Mr. Maude, I really must beg you to let me make some cuttings from your rose-trees; I have two excellent briars here, and I flatter myself I can graft as well as any gardener.'

'You can do everything, Mrs. Ellmer,' said I gravely, with honest gratitude and admiration. 'You can make cuttings from every tree in the garden, if you please, and they will all hold their heads the higher for it.'

The poor lady liked a little bit of simple flattery, and indeed it by no means now seemed out of place. The Highland air had brought the pink colour back to her wan face, and brightened her eyes, so that one now noticed with admiration the extreme delicacy of her features; while the rest and the relief from worry had softened both her careworn expression and the haggard outline of her face. She now, with coquettish sprightliness, tapped my shoulder and shook her head to show me that she had no faith in my blandishments.

'Don't talk to me,' she said, but with a smile which contradicted the prohibition; 'I'm too old for compliments, a woman with a grown-up daughter!'

Now I was quite glad to go back to the subject suggested by her last words.

'Who is the happy object of the young lady's preference?' I asked, trying to speak in a tone of badinage, though indeed I thought Babiole much too young and too pretty to bestow even the most make-believe affection on any one north o' Tweed, or south of it either, for that matter.

'It's one of the young Duncans, at Fir Lodge; the pretty-looking lad with the curly fair hair.'

I gave a little 'hoch!' of disgust. A great freckle-faced lout of a boy—I knew him! I remembered, too, that the Duncans had joined heartily in a scandalised murmur, far-off sounds of which had reached my ears, at the enormity of my bringing play-acting folk to my Highland seraglio. With very few more words I left Mrs. Ellmer, more put out than I cared to show. However, after looking angrily at the rhododendrons in the drive for a little while, I happily remembered that the annual visit of my four oddly-assorted friends was due within a month, and that then I should have something more interesting to occupy my mind than the flirtations of a couple of children. 'And after that,' I said to myself, 'I think I shall set off on my wanderings again for a little while, and the Ellmers can remain here until they, too, are tired of it, and so we shall avoid any wrench over the break-up.' That the break-up must come I knew, and, on the whole, I felt that it had better come early than late—for me, at any rate.