'Well—quick; from what you know of him?'
'Which I do as well as one fellow can know another in the same battalion, I am sure he would never dispossess so charming—two such charming cousins.'
'Indeed! you have said something like this already.'
'Would you not write to him and ask—'
'Emphatically—no!'
'Allow me, then?' asked Colville, in his most persuasive tone.
'Never! I—we shall be beholden to none! I thought, small as it is, that Birkwoodbrae was almost our patrimony; it proves to be his, so let him have it.'
'And you——'
'Have the world wide before me,' she replied, with a quiver of her sweet upper lip; 'with us—Ellinor and me—it may be as in Strathallan's Lament—
"Ruin's wheel has driven o'er us,
Not a hope may now attend;
The world wide is all before us,
But a world without a friend."