'She--she shall have all I have to leave in this world,' he muttered. 'For the lad's sake, and for the sake of one of her sex--dead this thirty years. And for her own sake, too--a fine, a fair creature, a bonny lass!' He made as though he would reach a desk that stood near upon a table, but fell back weakly in his chair.
'Time enough yet for that, I daresay,' he said, closing his eyes.
There is often 'time enough' for the making of those wills, and yet the future finds them--unmade.
Down in the fields, near where, nowadays, Ainslie and Moray Places rear their respectable family mansions--fields white that morning with the thick, wintry rime--Archibald Herries and Alison Graham walked side by side. He was bareheaded in the cold, for assuredly a man does not talk easily of love with his hat on his head. He held it in a hand behind him; the other arm had Alison's hand between it and his heart. This girl was his. Had he needed to ask? There are some things craved and received without question and answer. Suspicion and mistrust seemed to have vanished away; no man could harbour either while he looked in Alison's eyes.
'Whom shall we tell first, Ally?' he was asking.
'Need we tell anyone, sir--just yet?' said Alison, wistfully. 'Isn't it too new and too--too good to be told?'
The words were too strictly an echo from his own nature for him to find fault with them.
'But my cousin might have to be told,' he suggested.
'Nancy? Oh, no, no!' said Alison, impulsively.
'Why?' said Herries, laughing. 'I thought you were such dear friends, and had no secrets from each other?'
'So we are--dear friends, sir,' said Alison, though not quite with the enthusiasm she might have felt a month ago. 'But--I could not tell her of this. 'Tis different to everything else in the world.'
'That's true,' Herries answered. 'Ally,' he said, suddenly, 'are you prepared to find me but a poor lover? For 'tis that I'm likely to prove, I fear. I am but a dry stick. Pretty speeches come so shyly to my lips, and as to love-letters, I never put pen to paper but in the way of business. Weeks might pass and I might never say, "I love you."'
'Sure,' said Alison slowly, as though she were thinking out some abstruse and difficult problem, 'sure, 'tis the people that love each other most that never do say "I love you." All my life long I've loved my father and my sisters and little Jacky when he came, but I never thought to say "I love you" to one of them. If you know a thing in your heart, the less need to have it on your lips. Don't you think so, sir?'