Cicely and her host exchanged one fleeting glance and then looked extremely unconscious.
"She's derned wise!" said he to himself.
He held out his hand to the gratified counsellor.
"Well done, Bisset, you've touched your top form to-day, and I may tell you I've been wanting some one like you badly for a long while, if you are willing to stay on with me. Put that in your pipe, Bisset, and smoke over it! And now, you know your way, go and get yourself some tea, and a drink of the wildest poison you fancy!"
Hardly was the door closed behind him than the laird put his fate to the test as promptly and directly as he did most other things.
"I want you to stop on too, Cicely—for ever. Will you?"
Her eyes, shyly questioning for a moment and then shyly tender, answered his question before her lips had moved, and it would have been hard to convince them that the minutes which followed ever had a parallel within human experience.
A little later he confessed:
"Do you know, Cicely, I've always had a funky feeling that if I ever proposed my glass eye would drop out!"
The next event was the somewhat sudden entry of Lilian Cromarty, and that lady's self control was never more severely tested or brilliantly vindicated. One startled glance, and then she was saying, briskly, and with the old bright smile:
