“Mind you what you’ve promised him, Miss Lily,” said that authority, chuckling; “he is to cowp you over his head, if he likes, the day.”
“He’ll not do that!” cried Lily confidently, waving her hand to the assembled household, who were standing outside the door to see her start. What a diversion she was, with her comings and goings, her adventures and mishaps, to that good pair! How dull it must have been for them before Lily came to excite their curiosity and brighten their sense of humor. Dougal returned to his work, shaking once more with a laugh that went down to his boots and thrilled him all over, saying to himself: “He’s ower much of a gentleman to take her at her word;” while Katrin stood shading her eyes with her hand, and looking wistfully after the young creature in her confidence and gayety of youth. “Eh, but I hope the lad’s worthy of her,” was what Katrin said.
Ronald was lying once more upon the big hair-cloth sofa, as she had left him. He would not stay in bed, Helen lamented, though it would have been so much better for him. “But a simple sprain,” she said, “no complication. If I could have persuaded him to bide quiet in his bed, he would have been well at the end of the week; but nothing would please him but to be down here, limping down stairs, at the risk of a fall, with two sticks and only one foot. My heart was in my mouth at every step.”
“But he is none the worse,” cried Lily, “and I can understand Mr. Lumsden, Helen. It is far, far more cheery here, where he can see every thing that is going on, and have you and Mr. Blythe to talk to. A sprain makes your ankle bad, but not your mind.”
“That is true,” said Ronald, “and what I have been laboring to say, but had not the wit. My ankle is bad, but not my mind. I am in no such hurry to get well as Miss Blythe thinks. Don’t you see,” he said, looking up in Lily’s face, as she stood beside him, “in what clover I am here?”
Lily answered the look, but not the words. A tremulous sense of ease and happiness arose in her being. The moor was sweet when he was there, and to look for that hour in the evening had been enough for the first days to make her happy. But to start out to meet him, nobody knowing, glad as she had been to do it, cost Lily a pang. There are some people to whom the stolen joys are the most sweet, but Lily was not one of these. The clandestine wounded her sense of delicacy, if not her conscience. She was doing no wrong, she had said to herself, but yet it felt like wrong so long as it was secret, so long as a certain amount of deception was necessary to procure it. She was like the house-maid, stealing out to meet her lover. To the house-maid there was nothing unbecoming in that, but there was to Lily. She had suffered even while she was happy. But now the clandestine was all over. The constant presence of the old minister, who regarded them with eyes in which there was too much insight and satire for Lily’s peace of mind, was troublesome, but it was protection; it set her heart at rest. The accident restored all at once the ease of nature. “It is the best thing that could have happened,” Ronald said, when Helen left them alone, and Mr. Blythe had hidden himself behind the large, broad sheet of The Scotsman, the new clever Whig paper which had lately begun to bring the luxury of news twice a week to the most distant corners of the land. “I don’t mean to get better at the end of the week. It was a dreadful business yesterday, but I see the advantage of it now.”
“Was it so dreadful yesterday, poor Ronald?” she said in the voice of a dove, cooing at his ear.
“It was not delightful yesterday, though I had the sweetest Lily. But now I warn you, Lily, I mean to keep ill as long as I can. You will come and stay with me; it is your duty, for nobody knows me at Kinloch-Rugas but only you, and you are the good Samaritan. You put me on your own beast, and brought me to the inn.”
“Oh, do not speak like that, do not put me in mind that we are both deceivers! I have forgotten it, now that we are here.”
“We are no deceivers,” he said. “It is all quite true; you put me on your own beast. And where did you get all that strength, Lily? You must have almost lifted me in your arms, you slender little thing, a heavy fellow like me!”