Why? Truth to tell, Jessie loved him, but she said to herself, “Now he is rich and I am poor, it cannot be.”
I do not know whether this was a pardonable pride in Jessie or not. Perhaps it was.
Then came an evening when Kenneth, Archie, and Jessie were strolling together on the banks of the loch. It was to be the last night in Scotland of the two American farmers, as they called themselves, and she could not refuse to go with them to see the sun set behind the mountains.
Kenneth felt very sad, and spoke but little, Jessie hardly at all; in fact, she felt that it would not take much to make her cry.
Archie was still a student of natural history, and a new species of fern caught his eye. He must climb the fence, must commit a trespass even to find it, and his companions strolled on.
It was hardly an evening calculated to inspire hope or joy. A breeze roughened the lake, and went moaning through the almost leafless trees; the fields were bare or ploughed, the hedgerows looked sickly, and the brackens—so lovely in summer—were brown or broken down or bent. Still, the robin sang in the woods. That was something.
Kenneth and Jessie leant against a stile to wait for Archie; but that fern required a deal of examination.
“Archie seems in no hurry,” said Jessie, looking back.
“He has found a flower of some kind, I suppose,” replied Kenneth.
“There are few flowers in November,” she said, quickly.