"Now you know I don't!" he expostulated.
"Yes, you do, Angus! If you don't want me to work, you want me to be a perfectly useless and tiresome woman! Why, my dearest, now that you love me, I should like to work all the harder! If you think the cottage pretty, I shall try to make it even prettier. And I don't want to give up all my lace-mending. It's just as pleasant and interesting as the fancy-work which the rich ladies play with You must really let me go on working, Angus! I shall be a perfectly unbearable person if you don't!"
She looked so sweetly at him, that as they were at the moment passing under the convenient shadow of a tree he took her in his arms and kissed her.
"When you become a perfectly unbearable person," he said, "then it will be time for another deluge, and a general renovation of human kind. You shall work if you like, my Mary, but you shall not work for me. See?"
A tender smile lingered in her eyes.
"I see!" and linking her arm through his again, she moved on with him over the thyme-scented grass, her dress gently sweeping across the stray clusters of golden cowslips that nodded here and there. "I will work for myself, you will work for me, and old David will work for both of us!"
They laughed joyously.
"Poor old David!" said Angus. "He's been wondering why I have not spoken to you before,—he declared he couldn't understand it. But then I wasn't quite sure whether you liked me at all——"
"Weren't you?" and her glance was eloquent.
"No—and I asked him to find out!"