A light dawned upon me! The silver mystery, then, was intended for a wand,—and a very pretty way of making love to an American girl, too, to call it a "sceptre of rule over fair Scotland;" and the three birds were three singing laverocks "to mind her of him when he was gone!"
But the real Hynde Horn in the dear old ballad had a true love who was not captious and capricious and cold like Francesca. His love gave him a gay gold ring,—
"Of virtue and value above all thing."
Yet stay: behind the ballad book flung heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring,—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, degenerate days!
Francesca came in at the door behind me, saw her secret reflected in my telltale face, saw the sympathetic moisture in my eyes, and, flinging herself into my willing arms, burst into tears.
"Oh, Pen, dear, dear Pen, I am so miserable and so happy; so afraid that he won't come back, so frightened for fear that he will! I sent him away because there were so many lions in the path, and I didn't know how to slay them. I thought of my f-father; I thought of my c-c-country. I didn't want to live with him in Scotland, I knew that I couldn't live without him in America, and there I was! I didn't think I was s-suited to a minister, and I am not; but oh! this p-particular minister is so s-suited to me!" and she threw herself on the sofa and buried her head in the cushions.
She was so absurd even in her grief that I had hard work to keep from smiling.
"Let us talk about the lions," I said soothingly. "But when did the trouble begin? When did he speak to you?"
"After the tableaux last night; but of course there had been other—other—times—and things."
"Of course. Well?"