pleased at his choice, but nothing in connection with poor Sandy could please her just now. He was bearing his disappointment far better than she was, for her trouble was worse than a disappointment. The unbearable part to her was the fact that stared her in the face, the fact that she was deliberately taking the privilege denied him. 

 She walked away from the hall slowly and silently, between Joanna Falls and Annie Brown, for Joanna's cavalier was a very uncertain quantity and poor plain Annie had never had a beau in her life. But Joanna suddenly remembered that she had left her handkerchief on the seat in the hall, and must run back for it before Trooper and Duke locked the door. The girls knew better than to wait for her, and then Burke Wright and Mitty strolled up and began talking with Annie. Christina stepped behind them in the narrow pathway for a moment, and it was then that a tall figure loomed up beside her out of the darkness, and a musical voice with a slow Highland accent that it was impossible to mistake, repeated the proper formula. 

 "May I see you home, Christine?" 

 Christina stopped short in the pathway. Never in all her nineteen years had she been asked that momentous question; the opening note of all country romances. She had heard it sounded on every side for years but its music had always passed her by. She had begun to wonder just a little wistfully, when she would hear it. And now here it was! But, alas, like her first birthday gift, it had came from an unwelcome source! 

 But she answered quite cordially, being incapable of deliberately wounding any one, and Gavin gave a deep breath of relief as he took his place at her side. He was too shy to take her arm in the approved fashion, as all young men did when seeing a young woman to her home. Instead he left a foot or two between them as they walked up the hill under the stars in the warm scented darkness. 

 Christina tried to chat, but Gavin was so overcome with the wonder of seeing her home, that he could not talk. He longed for some deadly peril to threaten her so that he might be her protector, some catastrophe that he might avert. 

 He was fairly aching to tell her that his great ambition was to be her Warrior Bold, and ride out to do doughty deeds for her sweet sake; that she was his Love so young and fair, of whom he had been singing, with eyes so blue and heart so true; but instead, he walked dumbly by her side, keeping carefully a yard away from her, and answering her 

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