'True, very true, Ally,' said Herries, thinking to himself what a pearl of sweet sense he had found, and how she suited him; 'only--only--'
'Only I would it were the General's Entry, dear,' whispered Herries, at her ear, 'with walls and nothing but a dim old lamp....'
'Ah, but it's not, sir!' cried Alison, pulling away from him, scarlet with blushes; ''tis the open field, and there comes Willy!'
'Plague take the child--so he does!' said Herries.
He had given the boy a shilling to spend at a booth in the suburb, and it seemed to him hardly a shilling's-worth of absence that had been granted. Willy came racing towards them, vociferous, flying a newly-purchased kite above his head.
'So we must go, I suppose, sir?' said Alison, wistfully.
''Tis getting mighty cold, though we haven't noticed it,' Herries observed, as they walked townwards across the fields. 'I think I smell the snow.'
A thin, yellowish film had gathered over the bright sun, which, day after day, had made the long, strong frost endurable. The cold, indeed, became perceptibly greater, and a slight, shivering wind set in from the north.
'Haste you home, child,' said Herries, 'and be in before the storm. You may guess whether I come soon to the Potterrow or not.'
'N--not too often, sir,' whispered Alison. The whisper might have stood for the mere coyness of a girl, and so Herries translated it. But in Alison's mind was the troubled knowledge of how little welcome her lover was just now, in the little room which his own liberality helped to make so cosy and so home-like. It was very hard, she thought, but time would doubtless show a way out of the difficulty, if one were only patient.
Alison, indeed, was very grave as she walked home that day, after parting from her lover. She was very happy. Her feeling for Herries had become--as such feelings will with such natures--a part and parcel of herself--the very heart of her. It was a wondrous thing, a miracle, that the one man she had ever known should also be the one man in the world most worthy of love and honour. But then, to reverent and simple minds, the miracle brings awe as well as joy, and Alison was a little afraid of her own happiness, as though it could hardly be meant for such as she. Not for nothing was she the daughter of those bucolic, hard-lived ancestors of hers, who, generation after generation, in the dull obscurity of The Mains, had dragged through joyless and prosaic lives, ignorant of the world beyond the boundaries of their home. Something of a want of buoyancy was Alison's, and it came from that old home source. But she loved,--and the tingle of the new sensation ran through her veins like wine, though it left her sober.