I kept well round to the back, for I did not care that the serving-folk should see me and spread tales over all the countryside. I knew that Marjory's window looked sharp down on a patch of green lawn, bordered by lime-trees, so I rode into the shadow and dismounted. I whistled thrice in a way which I had, and which Marjory had learned to know long before, when we were children, and I used to come and beguile her out for long trampings among the hills. To-day it had no effect, for the singing of birds drowned my notes, so I had nothing left but to throw bits of bark against her window. This rude expedient met with more success than it deserved, for in a minute I saw her face behind the glass. She smiled gladly when she saw me, and disappeared, only to appear again in the little door beside the lilacs. She had no hat, so her bright hair hung loose over her neck and was blown about by the morning winds. Her cheeks were pink and white, like apple-blossom, and her lithe form was clad in a dress of blue velvet, plainly adorned as for a country maiden. A spray of lilac was in her breast, and she carried a bunch of sweet-smelling stuff in her hands.
She came gladly towards me, her eyes dancing with pleasure. "How soon you have returned! And how brave you look," said she, with many more pretty and undeserved compliments.
"Ay, Marjory," I answered, "I have come back to Tweeddale, for I have had enough of Glasgow College and books, and I was wearying for the hills and Tweed and a sight of your face. There are no maidens who come near to you with all their finery. You are as fair as the spring lilies in the garden at Barns."
"Oh, John," she laughed, "where did you learn to pay fine compliments? You will soon be as expert at the trade as any of them. I met a man yesterday in the woods who spoke like you, though with a more practised air; but I bade him keep his fine words for his fine ladies, for they suited ill with the hills and a plain country maid."
At this, I must suppose that my brows grew dark, for she went on laughingly.
"Nay, you are not jealous? It ill becomes a scholar and a philosopher as you are, Master John, to think so much of an idle word. Confess, sir, that you are jealous. Why, you are as bad as a lady in a play."
I could not make out her mood, which was a new one to me—a mocking pleasant raillery, which I took for the rightful punishment of my past follies.
"I am not jealous," I said, "for jealousy is a feeling which needs an object ere it can exist. No man may be jealous, unless he has something to be jealous about."
"John, John," she cried, and shook her head prettily, "you are incorrigible. I had thought you had learned manners in the town, and behold, you are worse than when you went away. You come here, and your first word to me is that I am nothing."
"God knows," I said, "I would fain be jealous, and yet—" I became awkward and nervous, for I felt that my mission was not prospering, and that I was becoming entangled in a maze of meaningless speech. The shortest and plainest way is still the best in love as in all things.