She sat pressing herself into the corner of the seat, and the long pent-up tears poured forth. They had been getting too much for her, like a stream shut in by artificial barriers, and now came with a flood, like the same stream in spate and carrying every obstruction away. It was almost a pleasure to see (if there had been any one to do so) the good heart with which Kirsteen wept: she made no noise, but the tears poured forth in a great shower, relieving her head and her heart. They were very heavy, but they were not bitter. They meant a great deal of emotion and stirring up of her whole being, but though her feelings were very poignant they were not without pleasure. She had never felt so elevated above herself, above every dull circumstance that surrounded her. She had been very sorry and had shed tears plentifully when the other boys went away. But this was not the same. She perhaps did not confess to herself, yet she knew very well that it was not altogether for Robbie. Robbie had his share, but there was another now. For years Kirsteen and Ronald Drummond had been good friends. When he went away before she had felt a secret pang, and had been very eager to hear the news of the battles and that he was safe: but something had changed this friendship during the last summer while he had been at home. Not a word had been said: there was no love-making; they were both too shy to enter upon any revelation of feeling, nor was there any opportunity for explanations, since they were always surrounded by companions, always in the midst of a wandering, easy-minded party which had no respect for any one’s privacy. But Kirsteen when she marked her brother’s handkerchiefs with her hair had fully intended that Ronald should see it, and be struck with the similarity of the initials and ask for or take one of them at least. Her heart beat high when this happened according to her prevision; and when he stooped and whispered, “Will ye wait for me, Kirsteen, till I come back?” the answering whisper, “That I will!” had come from the bottom of her heart. She had scarcely been aware of what was said in the hurry of the moment. But it had come back to her, every syllable and every tone as soon as it was all over. Their spirits had floated together in that one moment, which was only a moment, yet enough to decide the course of two lives. They were too much bound by the laws of their youthful existence to think of breaking any observance in order to expand these utterances, or make assurance sure. That Ronald should spend his last evening at home with his mother and sister, that Kirsteen should be present at Robbie’s parting supper, was as the laws of the Medes and the Persians to these two. No emergency could be imagined of sufficient weight to interfere with such necessities of life. And there was something in their simple absolutism of youthful feeling which was better expressed in the momentary conjunction, in the sudden words so brief and pregnant, than in hours of lovers’ talk, of which both boy and girl would have thought shame. “Will ye wait for me till I come back?” What more could have been said in volumes? and “That I will!” out of the fervour of a simple heart? Kirsteen thought it all over again and again. He seemed to stand by her side bending a little over her with a look half smile, half tears in his eyes; and she was aware again of the flash of the sweet discovery, the gold thread of the little letters put to his lips, and then the question, “Will ye wait?” Wait! for a hundred years, for all the unfathomed depths of life, through long absence and silence, each invisible to the other. “That I will!” She said it over and over again to herself.