that it was my cousin Edie.

I knew it, I say, and yet had she not touched me I might have passed her
a score of times and never known it. My word, if Jim Horscroft had
asked me then if she were pretty or no, I should have known how to
answer him! She was dark, much darker than is common among our border
lasses, and yet with such a faint blush of pink breaking through her
dainty colour, like the deeper flush at the heart of a sulphur rose.
Her lips were red, and kindly, and firm; and even then, at the first
glance, I saw that light of mischief and mockery that danced away at the
back of her great dark eyes. She took me then and there as though I had
been her heritage, put out her hand and plucked me. She was, as I have
said, in black, dressed in what seemed to me to be a wondrous fashion,
with a black veil pushed up from her brow.

"Ah! Jack," said she, in a mincing English fashion, that she had learned
at the boarding school. "No, no, we are rather old for that"--this
because I in my awkward fashion was pushing my foolish brown face
forward to kiss her, as I had done when I saw her last. "Just hurry up
like a good fellow and give a shilling to the conductor, who has been
exceedingly civil to me during the journey."

I flushed up red to the ears, for I had only a silver fourpenny piece
in my pocket. Never had my lack of pence weighed so heavily upon me as
just at that moment. But she read me at a glance, and there in an
instant was a little moleskin purse with a silver clasp thrust into my
hand. I paid the man, and would have given it back, but she still would
have me keep it.

"You shall be my factor, Jack," said she, laughing. "Is this our