He was in no haste to return to his audience.

To have his first poem thus rejected was killing.

She was but a child who had so unkindly criticized it, but she was the child he wanted to please; and for a few moments life itself seemed scarcely worth having.

He called himself a fool, and resolved never to read another poem to a girl so long as he lived.
By the time he had again walked through the burn, however, he was calm and comparatively wise, and knew what to say.
"Div ye hear yon burn efter ye gang to yer bed, mem ?" he asked Genevra, as he climbed the bank, pointing a little lower down the stream to the mountain brook which there joined it.
"Always," she answered.

"It runs right under my window." "What kin' o' a din dis't mak' ?" he asked again.
"It is different at different times," she answered.