delight of every one present, led the dance with her.

It was a little triumph for the elder; and he sat smiling, and twirling
his fingers, and thoroughly enjoying the event. Indeed, he was so
interested in listening to the clever way in which "the bonnie woman
flattered Van Heemskirk," that he was quite oblivious of the gathering
wrath in his son's face, and the watchful gloom in Bram's eyes, as the
two men stood together, jealously observant of Captain Hyde's attentions
to Katherine. Without any words spoken on the subject, there was an
understood compact between them to guard the girl from any private
conversation with him; and yet two men with hearts full of suspicion and
jealousy were not a match for one man with a heart full of love. In a
moment, in the interchange of their hands in a dance, Katherine clasped
tightly a little note, and unobserved hid it behind the rose at her
breast.

But nothing is a wonder in love, or else it would have been amazing that
Joanna did not notice the rose absent from her sister's dress after
Captain Hyde's departure; nor yet that Katherine, ere she went to rest
that night, kissed fervently a tiny bit of paper which she hid within
the silver clasps of her Kirk Bible. The loving girl thought it no wrong
to put it there; she even hoped that some kind of blessing or sanction
might come through such sacred keeping; and she went to sleep
whispering to herself,--"_Happy I am. Me he loves; me he loves; me only
he loves; me forever he loves_!"


[Illustration: Tail-piece]

[Illustration: Chapter heading]