beside the laurel bush, pulling one of its shiny leaves to pieces, and
looking right ahead, across the sunshiny Links, the long shore of
yellow sands, where the mermaids might well delight to come and "take
hands"--to the smooth, dazzling, far-away sea. No sea is more beautiful
than that at St. Andrews.

Its sleepy glitter seemed to have lulled Robert Roy into a sudden
meditation, of which no word of his companion came to rouse him. In
truth, she, never given much to talking, simply stood, as she often did,
silently beside him, quite satisfied with the mere comfort of his
presence.

I am afraid that this Fortune Williams will be considered a very
weak-minded young woman. She was not a bit a coquette, she had not the
slightest wish to flirt with any man. Nor was she a proud beauty
desirous to subjugate the other sex; and drag them triumphantly at her
chariot wheels. She did not see the credit, or the use, or the pleasure
of any such proceeding. She was a self-contained, self-dependent woman.
Thoroughly a woman; not indifferent at all to womanhood's best blessing;
still she could live without it if necessary, as she could have lived
without anything which it had pleased God to deny her. She was not a
creature likely to die for love, or do wrong for love, which some people
think the only test of love's strength, instead of its utmost weakness;
but that she was capable of love, for all her composure and quietness,
capable of it, and ready for it, in its intensest, most passionate, and
most enduring form, the God who made her knew, if no one else did.

Her time would come; indeed, had come already. She had too much
self-respect to let him guess it, but I am afraid she was very fond
of--or, if that is a foolish phrase, deeply attached to--Robert Roy.