“It may have dropped among the broom,” replied the simple maid.

Whereupon the two set to seeking, both bareheaded, brown cropped head and golden wilderness of tresses not far from one another, while the “book of manuscript notes” rose and fell to the quickened heart-beating of that wicked and deceitful girl, Winsome Charteris.

CHAPTER VI.

Curled eyelashes.

Now Meg Kissock could stand a great deal, and she would put up with a great deal to pleasure her mistress; but half an hour of loneliness down by the washing was overly much for her, and the struggle between loyalty and curiosity ended, after the manner of her sex, in the victory of the latter.

As Ralph and Winsome continued to seek, they came time and again close together and the propinquity of flushed cheek and mazy ringlet stirred something in the lad’s heart which had never been touched by the Mistresses Thriepneuk, who lived where the new houses of the Plainstones look over the level meadows of the Borough Muir.  His father had often said within himself, as he walked the Edinburgh streets to visit some sick kirk member, as he had written to his friend Adam Welsh, “Has the lad a heart?” Had he seen him on that broomy knowe over the Grannoch water, he had not doubted, though he might well have been fearful enough of that heart’s too sudden awakening.

Never before had the youth come within that delicate Aura of charm which radiates from the bursting bud of the finest womanhood.  Ralph Peden had kept his affections ascetically virgin.  His nature’s finest juices had gone to feed the brain, yet all the time his heart had waited expectant of the revealing of a mystery.  Winsome Charteris had come so suddenly into his life that the universe seemed newborn in a day.  He sprang at once from the thought of woman as only an unexplained part of the creation, to the conception of her (meaning thereby Winsome Charteris) as an angel who had not lost her first estate.

It was a strange thing for Ralph Peden, as indeed it is to every true man, to come for the first time within the scope of the unconscious charms of a good girl.  There is, indeed, no better solvent of a cold nature, no better antidote to a narrow education, no better bulwark of defence against frittering away the strength and solemnity of first love, than a sudden, strong plunge into its deep waters.

Like timid bathers, who run a little way into the tide and then run out again with ankles wet, fearful of the first chill, many men accustom themselves to love by degrees.  So they never taste the sweetness and strength of it as did Ralph Peden in these days, when, never having looked upon a maid with the level summer lightning of mutual interest flashing in his eyes, he plunged into love’s fathomless mysteries as one may dive upon a still day from some craggy platform among the westernmost isles into Atlantic depths.