"I don't know. Are we playing at cross purposes?"
"Oh, don't let's argue about nothing! Let's be happy--perfectly happy."
"In other words, if milk has been spilt, don't water it with salt tears, but leave it to collect cream."
"Yes. Why doesn't everybody treat spilt milk like that?"
"It doesn't occur to poor worried humanity. It wouldn't occur to me in other society--Princess."
"Thank you, Sir Knight." I couldn't resist nestling my shoulder closer to his in joy and gratitude: and then an odd thing happened. A tiny shock of electricity seemed to flash through his shoulder to mine. I never felt anything like it before. It made my heart stop and afterward beat fast. I had to talk of something irrelevant in a hurry, so I grabbed at Burns: and indeed we ought not even for a minute to have talked of any other subject on this road, which we were exploring only because of Burns. Not that the high road between Kilmarnock and Dumfries wouldn't be worth seeing if Burns had never set foot on it, and if no other great ones had passed that way. It would be worth travelling for itself alone, for every mile has its own special beauty. And the more I think of Scotland the more I tell myself she is like a wise connoisseur (I hope that's the word!) who goes ahead of others to a sale of splendid pictures, and secures the finest for herself at a bargain. Several of the prettiest pictures hang on the blue-and-gold walls of the Burns country.
We came suddenly into view of Arran when the car had spun us along an up and down road to Ochiltree and Cumnock. It was I who, looking back, first caught sight of the jagged pinnacles boldly painted in purple on a far, pale sky. I didn't know what they were, but Sir S. put on the brakes quickly, and let us stop to look. He remembered the cliffs, and gazed at them with a light in his eyes which would have told me, if I hadn't known before, that he had been homesick for Scotland all these rich, successful years, whether consciously or not.
By and by we came to the Nith, which afterward we did not leave; and through a green glen wound the "sweet Afton" Burns wrote of and loved almost as dearly as he loved its elder brother. Here in this valley, companioned with his own starry thoughts, he walked and rode, happy in his fellowship with Nature, even though poverty made him an exciseman at fifty pounds a year. He had to put down smuggling with one hand and write his glorious poetry with the other, as Mrs. James expressed it. At New Cumnock he would spend a night sometimes on his way to Ellisland, his "farm that would not pay," near Dumfries.