"This is your way," she said, sitting down on the stile. "I am going up to John Scott's to see about the lambs. It will be breakfast-time at the manse before you got back."
Ralph's castle fell to the ground.
"I will come up with you to John Scott's," he said with an undertone of eagerness.
"Indeed, that you will not," said Winsome promptly, who did not want to arrive at seven o'clock in the morning at John Scott's with any young man. "You will go home and take to your book, after you have changed your shoes and stockings," she said practically.
"Well, then, let me bid you good-bye, Winsome!" said Ralph.
Her heart was warm to hear him say Winsome--for the first time. It certainly was not unpleasant, and there was no need that she should quarrel about that. She was about to give him her hand, when she saw something in his eye.
"Mind, you are not to kiss it as you did grannie's yesterday; besides, there are John Scott's dogs on the brow of the hill," she said, pointing upward.
Poor Ralph could only look more crestfallen still. Such knowledge was too high for him. He fell back on his old formula: "I said before that you are a witch--"
"And you say it again?" queried Winsome, with careless nonchalance, swinging her bonnet by its strings. "Well, you can come back and kiss grannie's hand some other day. You are something of a favourite with her."
But she had presumed just a hair-breadth too far on Ralph's gentleness. He snatched the lilac sunbonnet out of her hands, tearing, in his haste, one of the strings off, and leaving it in Winsome's hand. Then he kissed it once and twice outside where the sun shone on it, and inside where it had rested on her head. "You have torn it," she said complainlngly, yet without anger.
"I am very glad," said Ralph Peden, coming nearer to her with a light in his eye that she had never seen before.
Winsome dropped the string, snatched up the bonnet, and fled up the hill as trippingly as a young doe towards the herd's cottage. At the top of the fell she paused a moment with her hand on her side, as if out of breath. Ralph Peden was still holding the torn bonnet-string in his hand.
He held it up, hanging loose like a pennon from his hand. She could hear the words come clear up the hill: "I'm very--glad--that--I--tore--it, and I will come and--see-- your--grandmother!"
"Of all the--" Winsome stopped for want of words, speaking to herself as she turned away up the hill--"of all the insolent and disagreeable--"