"What said he? Tell me, dearest, if you can; tell your gossip, Maisie," she whispered.
It was a voice that not many could resist when it pleaded thus—most like a dove cooing to its mate in the early summer mornings.
There fell a silence for a while in the little upper room; but Maisie the wise one did not again speak. She only waited.
"Oh, I hate him!" at last said Kate McGhie, lifting her head with centred intensity of expression.
Maisie smiled a little, indulgently, leaning back so that her friend's dark eyes should not notice it. She smiled as one who is in the things of love at least a thousand years older, and who in her day has seen and tasted bread sweet and bread bitter.
"And certainly you do well to hate him, my Kate," this cunning Mistress Maisie said, very gently, her hand continuing to run softly through the meshes of Kate's curls; "nevertheless, for all that you are glad that he kissed you."
The girl lifted her head as quickly from its resting-place as though a needle had pricked her unawares. She eyed her friend with a grave, shocked surprise.
"You were listening!" she said.
And the censure in her tone might have been that of a General Assembly of the Kirk, so full of weighty rebuke was it.
"No, Kate," said her friend, quietly. "I was in the kitchen all the time, putting the bone in the broth for William's supper. I heard no single word of your talk. But, Kate, my lassie, I am not so very ignorant concerning these things which you stand on the brink of. Come, what had you been saying to him to provoke him to kiss you?"