Miss Mary was now more alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison of sluggish men's voices, women's eager earnest shrilling. It was as if he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the side a little to touch him and assure herself he was there.

And that awakened him! He listened with his workaday ears to separate from the clamour, as he once had done, the thread of golden melody. For a moment he was amazed and disappointed; no unusual voice was there. If Miss Nan was behind him, she was taking only a mute part in the praise, amused mildly perhaps—he could not blame—by this rough contrast with the more tuneful praise she was accustomed to elsewhere.

And then—then he distinguished her I No, he was wrong; no, he was right, there it was again, not so loud and clear as he had expected, but yet her magic, unmistakably, as surely as when first it sounded to him in "The Rover" and "The Man with the Coat of Green." A thrill went through him. He rose at the close of the psalm, and trod upon clouds more airily, high-breastedly, uplifted triumphantly, than Ronaig of Gaul who marched, in the story, upon plunging seas from land to land.

"He has been eating something wrong," concluded Miss Mary, finding ease of a kind in so poor an excuse for her darling's perturbation. It accounted to her for all his odd behaviour during the remainder of the service, for his muteness in the psalmody, his restless disregard of the sermon, his hurry to be out of the straight-backed, uncomfortable pew.

As he stood to his feet to follow the Paymaster she ventured a hand from behind upon his waist, pretending to hasten the departure, but in reality to get some pleasure from the touch. Again he never heeded; he was staring at the Maam pew, from which the General and his brother were slowly moving out.

There was no girl there!

He could scarcely trust his eyes. The aisle had a few women in it, moving decorously to the door with busy eyes upon each other's clothes; but no, she was not there, whose voice had made the few psalms of the day the sweetest of his experience. When he got outside the door and upon the entrance steps the whole congregation was before him; his glance went through it in a flash twice, but there was no Miss Nan. Her father and his brother walked up the street alone. Gilian realised that his imagination, and his imagination only, had tenanted the pew. She was not there!



CHAPTER XXIII—YOUNG ISLAY

"The clash in the kirkyard is worth half a dozen sermons," say the unregenerate, and though no kirkyard is about the Zion of our parish, the people are used to wait a little before home-going and talk of a careful selection of secular affairs; not about the prices of hoggs and queys, for that is Commerce, nor of Saturday night's songs in the tavern, for that (in the Sabbath mind) is Sin. But of births, marriages, courtships, weather, they discourse. And Gilian, his head dazed, stood in a group with the Paymaster and Miss Mary, and some of the people of the glens, who were the ostensible reason for the palaver. At first he was glad of the excuse to wait outside, for to have gone the few yards that were necessary down the street and sat at Sunday's cold viands even with Peggy's brew of tea to follow would be to place a flight of stairs and a larch door between him and—— And what? What was he reluctant to sever from? He asked himself that with as much surprise as if he had been a stranger to himself. He felt that to go within at once would be to lose something, to go out of a most agreeable atmosphere. He was not hungry. To sit with old people over an austere table with no flowers on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh, in some flutter of the breast It was better to be out here in the sun among the chattering people, to have nothing between him and Glen Shira but a straight sweep of wind-blown highway. From the steps of the church he could see the Boshang Gate and the hazy ravines and jostling elbows of the hills in Shira Glen. He saw it all, and in one bound his spirit vaulted there, figuring her whose psalm he had but heard in the delusion of desire.

The Duke came lazily down the steps, threw a glance among his clan and tenantry, cast his plaid, with a fine grace, about his shoulders, touching his bonnet with a finger as hat or bonnet rose in salutation, and he went fair up in the middle of the street.

The conversation ceased, and people looked after him as on an Emperor.

"He's going to London on Tuesday, I hear," said Major Hall to Mr. Spencer. It was the Majors great pride to know the prospective movements at the Castle sooner than any one else, and he was not above exchanging snuff-mulls with Wat Thomson, the ducal boot-brusher, if ducal news could only be got thereby.

"London, London; did you say, London, sir?" said the innkeeper, looking again with an envy after his Grace, the name at once stirring in him the clime from which he was an exile. And the smell of peaty clothes smote him on the nostril for the first time that day. He had been so many Sundays accustomed to it that as a rule he no longer perceived it, but now it rose in contrast to the beefy, beer-charged, comfortable odours of his native town.

"Ah! he's going on Tuesday," said the Paymaster, "but when Duke George's gone, there are plenty of Dukes to take his place. Every officer in his corps will be claiming a full command, quarrelling among themselves. There'll be Duke Islay——"

"Hus—s—sh!" whispered Major Hall discreetly from the corner of his mouth. "Here's his young fellow coming up behind." Then loudly, "It's a very fine season indeed, Captain Campbell, a very fine season."

Young Islay came forward with a salute for the Captain and his sister. He was Gilian's age and size, but of a different build, broader at the shoulder, fuller at the chest, black of hair, piercing of eye, with just enough and no more of a wholesome conceit of himself to give his Majesty's uniform justice. When he spoke it was with a clear and manly tone deep in the chest.

He shook hands all round, he was newly come home from the lowlands, his tunic was without speck or crease, his chin was smooth, his strong hands were white; as Gilian returned his greeting he felt himself in an enviable and superior presence.

Promptly, too, there came like a breath upon glass a remembrance of the ensign of the same corps who kissed his hand to Nan on just such another day of sunshine at Boshang Gate.

"Glad to see you back, Islay," said the Paymaster, proffering his Sabbath snuff-mull. "Faith, you do credit to the coat!" And he cast an admiring eye upon the young soldier.

Young Islay showed his satisfaction in his face.

"But it's a smaller coat than yours, Captain," said he, "and easier filled nowadays than when fighting was in fashion. I'm afraid the old school would have the better of us."

It was a touch of Gaelic courtesy to an elder, well-meant, pardonable; it visibly pleased the old gentleman to whom it was addressed, and he looked more in admiration than before upon this smart young officer.

"Up the Glen yet, Gilian?" said Islay, with the old schoolboy freedom, and Gilian carelessly nodded, his eyes once more roving on the road to Boshang Gate. Young Islay looked at him curiously, a little smile hovering about the corners of his lips, for he knew the dreamer's reputation.

The Paymaster gave a contemptuous "Humph!" "Up the Glen yet. You may well say it," said he. "And like to be. It's a fine clime for stirks."

Gilian did not hear it, but Miss Mary felt it sting to her very heart, and she moved away, pressing upon her favourite's arm to bring him with her. "We must be moving," said she; "Peggy will be scolding about the dinner spoiled with waiting."

But no one else seemed willing to break up the group. Young Islay had become the centre of attraction. MacGibbon and Major Hall, the Sheriff, Mr. Spencer and the dominie, listened to his words as to a sage, gratified by his robust and handsome youth, and the Turners had him by the arm and questioned him upon his experience. Major Mac-Nicol, ludicrous in a bottle-green coat with abrupt tails and an English beaver hat of an ancient pattern, jinked here and there among the people, tip-toeing, round shouldered, with eyes peering and alarmed, jerking his head across his shoulder at intervals to see that no musket barrel threatened, and at times, for a moment or two, he would hang upon the outskirts of Young Islay's levee, with a hand behind an ear to listen to his story, filled for a little space with a wave of vague and bitter recollection that never broke upon the shore of solid understanding, enchanted by a gleam of red and gold, the colours of glory and of youth.

"Let us go home," whispered Miss Mary, pulling gently at Gilian's coat.

"Wait, wait, no hurry for cold kail hot again," said the Paymaster, every instinct for gossip alert and eager.

"And you showed him the qualities of a Highland riposte! Good lad! Good lad! I'm glad that Sandy and you learned something of the art of fence before they tried you in the Stirling fashion," General Turner was saying. "You'll be home for a while won't you? Come up and see us at Maam; no ceremony, a bird, a soldier's jug, and——"

"And a soldier's song from Miss Nan, I hope," continued the young officer, smiling. "That would be the best inducement of all I hear she's home again from the low country, and thought she would have been in church to-day."

"City ways, you know, Islay, city ways," said Turner, tapping the young fellow playfully on the shoulder with his cane. "She did not come down because she must walk! I wonder what Dr. Colin would say if he found me yoking a horse to save a three miles Sabbath daunder to the kirk. Come up and have your song, though, any day you like; I'll warrant you never heard better."

"I'm certain I never did," admitted Young Islay heartily.

"And when I think," said the General softly, more closely pressing the young fellow's arm, "that there might be no song now at all but for your readiness with an oar, I'm bound to make a tryst of it: say Tuesday."

"Certainly!" said Young Islay. "About my readiness with an oar, now, that was less skill than a boy's luck. I can tell you I was pretty frightened when I baled—good heavens, how long ago I—the water from the punt, and felt the storm would smother me!" He was flushing to speak of a thing so much to his credit, and sought relief from his feelings by a random remark to the Paymaster's boy.

"You mind?" said he, with a laughing look at Gilian, who wished now that he were in the more comfortable atmosphere of the Paymaster's parlour for he was lamentably outside the interests of this group. "You mind?" he pressed again, as if the only victim of that storm and stranding could ever forget!

"I remember very well," said Gilian in an Anglified accent that renewed all Miss Mary's apprehension, for it showed an artificial mood. "I came out of that with small credit," he went on, sparing himself nothing. "I suppose I would have risked my life half a dozen times over to be of any service; what was wanting was the sense to know what I should do. There you had the advantage of me. And did you really bail the boat with your bonnet?"

"Faith I did!" said Young Islay, laughing.

"I knew it," said Gilian. "I knew your feelings and your acts as well as if it had been myself that had been there. I wish my comprehension of the act to be done was as ready as my imagination. I wish—"

A shyness throttled the words in his mouth when he found all the company looking upon him, all amused or a little pitiful except the dominie, whose face had a kindly respect and curiosity, and Miss Mary, who was looking wistfully in his eyes.

"There are two worlds about us," said Brooks; "the manifest, that is as plain as a horn-book from A to Ampersand; the other, that is in the mind of man, no iota less real, but we are few that venture into it further than the lintel of the door." And he had about his eyes an almost fatherly fondness for Gilian, who felt that in the words were some justification for him, the dreamer.

The street was emptying, one by one the people had dispersed. Young Islay's group broke up, and went their several ways. The Paymaster and Miss Mary and Gilian went in to dinner.

"What's the matter with you, my dear?" whispered Miss Mary at the turn of the stair when her brother had gone within.

"Matter?" said Gilian, surprised at her discovery. "Nothing that I know of. What makes you think there is anything the matter with me?"

She stopped him at the stair-head, and here in the dusk of it she was again the young companion. "Gilian, Gilian," said she, with stress in her whisper and a great affection in the face of her. "Do you think I can be deceived? You are ill; or something troubles you. What were you eating?"

He laughed loudly; he could not help it at so prosaic a conclusion.

"What carry-on is that on the stair on a Lord's day?" cried the Paymaster angrily and roughly from his room as he tugged short-tempered at the buckle of his Sabbath stock.

"Then there's something bothering you, my dear," said Miss Mary again, paying no heed to the interruption. And Gilian could not release his arm from her restraint.

"Is there, Auntie?" said he. "Perhaps. And still I could not name it. Come, come, what's the sense of querying a man upon his moods?"

"A man!" said Miss Mary.

"On the verge at least," said he, with a confidence he had never had in his voice before, taking a full breath in his chest.

"A man!" said she again. And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced, trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart.

"I wish, I wish," said she all trembling, "the children did not grow at all!"



CHAPTER XXIV—MAAM HOUSE

Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its surface like a looking-glass or shivers in icy winds. Round about the bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs from shore to shore.

To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings, and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant, her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about her head, her eyes brimming and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom generous—she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that hers was a soldier's fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a tombstone—the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.

What she missed of the strident town was the clustering round of fellow creatures, the eternal drumming of neighbour hearts, the feet upon the pavement and the eager faces all around that were so full of interest they did not let her seek into the depths of her, where lay the old Highland sorrows that her richest notes so wondrously expressed. The tumult for herl Constant touch with the active, the gay! Solitude oppressed her like a looming disease. Sometimes, as in those mornings when she looked abroad from her window upon the Glen, she felt sick of her own company, terrified at the pathetic profound to which the landscape made her sink. Then she wept, and then she shook the mood from her angrily and flashed about the house of Maam like a sunbeam new-washed by the rain.

Her father used to marvel at those sudden whims of silence and of song. He would come in on some poor excuse from his stable or cunningly listen above his book and try to understand; but he, the man of action, the soldier, the child of undying ambitions, was far indeed from comprehension. Only he was sure of her affection. She would come and sit upon his knee, with arms around his neck, indulgent madly in a child's caresses. Her uncle James, finding them thus sometimes, would start at an illusion, for it looked as if her mother was back again, and her father, long so youthful of aspect, seemed the sweetheart husband once more.

"Ah! you randy!" he would say to his niece, scowling upon her; "the sooner you get a man the better!"

"If there is one in the world half so handsome as my father—yes," she would answer merrily, nestling more fondly in the General's breast, till he rose and put her off with laughing confusion.

"Away! away!" he would cry in pretended annoyance. "You make my grey hairs ridiculous."

"Where are they?" she would say, running her white fingers over his head and daintily refastening the ribbon of that antiquated queue that made him always look the chevalier. She treated him, in all, less like a father than a lover, exceedingly proud of him, untiring of his countless tales of campaign and court, uplifted marvellously with his ambitious dreams of State preferment. For General Turner was but passing the time in Maam till by favour promised a foreign office was found for him elsewhere.

"And when the office comes," said he, "then I leave my girl. It is the one thing that sobers me."

"Not here! not here!" she cried, alarm in eye and tone. So he found, for the first time, her impatience with the quiet of Maam. He was, for a little, dumb with regret that this should be her feeling.

"Where better, where safer, my dear?" he asked.

"Come up to the bow-window." And he led her where she could see their native glen from end to end.

In the farm-towns the cots were displayed; smoke rose from their chimneys in the silent air, grey blue banners of peace. "Bide at home, my dear," said he softly, "bide at home and rest. I thought you would have been glad to be back from towns among our own kindly people in the land your very heart-blood sprang from. Quiet, do you say? True, true," and still he surveyed the valley himself with solemn eyes. "But there is content here, and every hearth there would make you welcome if it was only for your name, even if the world was against you."

She saw the reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy. Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. "Is it not homely?" said he, dreading her reply. "I can bear it—with you," she answered pitifully. "But if you go abroad, it would kill me. I must have something that is not here; I must have youth and life—and—life."

"At your age I would not have given Maam and the glen about it for my share of Paradise."—"But now?" said she.

He turned hastily from the window and nervously paced the room.

"No matter about me," he answered in a little. "Ah! you're your mother's child. I wish—I wish I could leave you content here." He felt at his chin with a nervous hand, muttered, looked on her askance, pitied himself that when he went wandering he must not have the consoling thought that she was safe and happy in her childhood's home.

"I wish I had never sent you away," he said. "You would have been more content to-day. But that's the manner of the world, we must pay our way as we go, in inns and in knowledge."

She ran up with tripping feet and kissed him rapturously.

"No lowland tricks!" he cried, pleased and yet ashamed at a display unusual in these parts. "Fancy if some one saw you!"

"Then let them look well again," she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and dandled on his knee.

"I wish," said he again, while she neatly tied the knot upon his queue, "I wish we had a husband for you, good or—indifferent, before I go."

"Not indifferent, father," she laughed. "Surely the best would not be too good for your daughter! As if I wanted a husband of any kind!"

"True, true," he answered thoughtfully. "You are young yet. The best would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman's well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no less. Can you guess him?"

"The Paymaster's Boy," said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.

Her father laughed.

"Pooh!" he exclaimed. "Is that all you have of our news here that you don't know Gilian's farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield? He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very humorous now when I think of it."

"I told him he never would," said Nan, with no note of triumph in the accuracy of her prediction. "I thought he could play-act the thing in his mind too well ever to be the thing itself."

"It was Young Islay I meant," said her father. "A smart fellow; he's home on leave from his corps, and he promises to come some day this week to see the girl whose father has some reason to be grateful to him."

She flushed all at once, overtaken by feelings she could not have described—feelings of gratitude for the old rescue, of curiosity, pleasure, and a sudden shyness. Following it came a sudden recollection of the old glamour that was about the ensign—such another, no doubt, as Young Islay—who had given her the first taste of gallantry as he passed with the troops in a day of sunshine. She looked out at the window to conceal her eyes, and behold! the glen was not so melancholy as it was a little ago. She wished she had put on another gown that afternoon, the rustling one of double tabinet that her Edinburgh friends considered too imposing for her years, but that she herself felt a singular complacence in no matter what her company might be.

"A smart fellow," repeated her father musingly, flicking some dust from his shoes, unobserving of her abstraction. "I wish Sandy took a lesson or two from him in application."

"Ah!" she cried, "you're partial just because——"

And she hesitated.

—"Just because he saved my lassie's life," continued Turner, and seized by an uncommon impulse he put an arm round her and bent to kiss her not unwilling lips. He paused at the threshold, and drew back with a half-shamed laugh.

"Tuts!" said he. "You smit me with silly lowland customs. Fancy your old Highland daddie kissing you! If it had been the young gentleman we speak of——"

A loud rap came to the knocker of the front door, and Nan's hands went flying to her hair in soft inquiries; back to her face came its colour.

It was Young Islay. He came into the room with two strides from the stair-head and a very genteel obeisance to the lady, a conceit of fashion altogether foreign to glens, but that sent her back in one dart of fancy to the parlour of Edinburgh, back to the warm town, back to places of gaiety, and youth, and enterprise, back to soft manners, the lip gossiping at the ear, shoes gliding upon waxen floors, music, dance, and mirth. Her heart throbbed as to a revelation, and she could have taken him in her arms for the sake of that brave life he indicated.

His eyes met hers whenever he entered, and he could not draw them away till hers, wavering before him, showed him he was daring. He turned and shook hands with the General, and muttered some commonplace, then back again he came to that pleasant face so like and yet so unlike the face he had known when a boy.

"You'll hardly know each other," said the father, amused at this common interest. "Isn't she a most elderly person to be the daughter of so young and capable a man?"

Young Islay ranged his mind for a proper compliment, but for once he was dumb; in all the oft-repeated phrases of his gallant experiences there was no sentiment to do justice to a moment like this. "I am delighted to meet you again," he said slowly, his mind confused with a sense of the inadequacy of the thing and the inexplicable feelings that crowded into him in the presence of a girl who, three years ago, would have no more disturbed him than would his sister. She was the first to recover from the awkwardness of the moment.

"I was just wishing I had on another gown," she said more frankly than she felt, but bound to give utterance to the last clear thought in her mind. "I had an idea we might have callers."

"You could have none that became you better," said the lad boldly, feasting upon her charms of lip and eye. And now he was the soldier—free, bold, assured.

"What? In the way of visitors," laughed her father, and she flushed again.

"I spoke of the gown," said Young Islay (and he had not yet seen it, it might have been red or blue for all he could tell). "I spoke of the gown; if it depends on that for you to charm your company, you should wear no other."

"A touch of the garrison, but honest enough to be said before the father!" thought General Turner.

Nan laughed. She courtesied with an affected manner taught in Edinburgh schools.

"Sir," she said, "you are a soldier, and of course the gown at the moment in front of you is always the finest in the world. Don't tell me it is not so," she hastened to add, as he made to protest, "because I know my father and all the ways of his trade, and—and—and if you were not the soldier even in your pleasantries to ladies I would not think you the soldier at all."

The General smiled and nudged the young fellow jocosely. "There," said he, "did I not tell you she was a fiery one?"

"I hope you did not discuss me in that fashion," said Nan, pausing with annoyance as she moved aside a little, all her pride leaping to her face.

"Your father will have his joke," said Young Islay quickly. "He barely let me know you were here."

The General smiled again in admiration of the young fellow's astuteness, and Nan recovered.

They went to the parlour. Through the window came the songs of the reapers and the twitter of birds busy among the seeds at the barn-door. Roses swinging on the porch threw a perfume into the room. Young Islay felt, for the first time in his life, a sense of placid happiness. And when Nan sang later—a newer, wider world, more years, more thoughts, more profound depths in her song—he was captive.

To his aid he summoned all his confidence; he talked like a prince (if they talk head-up, valiantly, serene and possessing); he moved about the room studiously unconscious and manly; he sat with grace and showed his hand, and all the time he claimed the girl for his. "You are mine, you are mine!" he said to himself over and over again, and by the flush on her neck as she sat at the harpsichord she might be hearing, through some magic sense, his bold unspoken thought.

Evening crept, lights came, the father went out to give some orders at the barn; they were left alone. The instrument that might have been a heavenly harp at once lost its dignity and relapsed to a tinkling wire, for Nan was silent, and there crowded into Young Islay's head all the passion of his people. He rose and strode across the room; he put an arm round her waist and raised her, all astounded, from the chair.

She turned round and tried to draw back, looking startled at his eyes that were wide with fire.

"What do you mean?" she gasped.

"Need you ask it?" he said in a new voice, raising an arm round her shoulder. His fingers unexpectedly touched her warm skin beneath the kerchief-souffle. The feeling ran to his heart, and struck him there like an earthquake. Down went his head, more firm his hold upon the lady's waist; she might have been a flower to crush, but yet he must be rude and strong; he bent her back and kissed her. Her lips parted as if she would cry out against this outrage, and he felt her breath upon his cheek, an air, a perfume maddening. "Nan, Nan, you are mine, you are mine!" said he huskily, and he kissed her again.

Out in the fields, a corncrake raised its rasping vesper and a shepherd whistled on his dogs. The carts rumbled as they made for the sheds. The sound of the river far off in the shallows among the saugh-trees came on a little breeze, a murmur of the sad inevitable sea that ends all love and passion, the old Sea beating black about the world.

In the room was an utter silence. She had drawn back for a moment stupefied, checking in her pride even the breathing of her struggle. He stood bent at the head a little, contrite, his hat, that he had lifted, in his hand. And they gazed at each other—people who had found themselves in some action horribly rude and shameful.

"I think you must have made a mistake, or have been drinking," she said at last, her breast now heaving stormily and her eyes ablaze with anger. "I am not the dairy-maid."

"I could not help it," he answered lamely. "You—you—you made me do it. I love you!" She drew back shocked.

He stepped forward again, manly, self-possessed again, and looked her hungrily in the eyes. "Do you hear that?" he said. "Do you hear that? I love you! I love you! There you look at me, and I'm inside like a fire. What am I to do? I am Highland; I am Long Islay's grandson. I am a soldier. I am Highland, and if I want you I must have you."

She drew softly towards the door as if to escape, but heard her father's voice without, and it gave her assurance. A pallor had come upon her cheek, only her lips were bright as if his kiss had seared them.

"You are Highland, you are Highland, are you?" she said, restraining her sobs. "Then where is the gentleman? Do you fancy I have been growing up in Maam all the years you were away among canteens for you to come home and insult me when you wished?"

He did not quail before her indignation, but he drew back with respect in every movement.

"Madame," he said, with a touch of the ballroom, "you may miscall me as you will; I deserve it all. I have been brutal; I have frightened you—that would not harm a hair of your head for a million pounds; I have disgraced the hospitality of your father's house. I may have ruined myself in your eyes, and to-morrow I'll writhe for it, but now—but now—I have but one plea: I love you! I'll say it, though you struck me dumb for ever."

She recovered a little, looked curiously at him, and "Is it not something of a liberty, even that?" she asked. "You bring the manners of the Inn to my father's house." The recollection of her helplessness in his grasp came to her again, and stained her face as it had been with wine.

He turned his hat in his hand, eyeing her dubiously but more calmly than before.

"There you have me," he said, with a large and helpless gesture, "I am not worth two of your most trivial words. I am a common rude soldier that has not, as it were, seen you till a moment ago, and when I was at your—at your lips, I should have been at your shoes."

She laughed disdainfully a little.

"Don't do that," said he, "you make me mad." Again the tumult of his passion swept him down; he put a foot forward as if to approach her, but stopped short as by an immense inward effort. "Nan, Nan, Nan," he cried so loudly that a more watchful father would have heard it outside. "Nan, Nan, Nan, I must say it if I die for it: I love you! I never felt—I do not know—I cannot tell what ails me, but you are mine!" Then all at once again his mood and accent changed. "Mine! What can I give? What can I offer? Here's a poor ensign, and never a war with chances in it!"

He strode up and down the room, throwing his shadow, a feverish phantom, on the blind, and Nan looked at him as if he had been a man in a play. Here was her first lover with a vengeance! They might be all like that; this madness, perhaps, was the common folly. She remembered that to him she owed her life, and she was overtaken by pity.

"Let us say no more about it," she said calmly. "You alarmed me very much, and I hope you will never do the like again. Let me think I myself was willing"—he started—"that it was some—some playful way of paying off the score I owe you."

"What score?" said he, astonished. "You saved my life," she answered, all resentment gone. "Did I?" said he. "It would be the last plea I would offer here and now. That was a boy's work, or luck as it might be; this is a man before you. I am not wanting gratitude, but something far more ill to win. Look at me," he went on; "I am Highland, I'm a soldier, I'm a man. You may put me to the door (my mother in heaven would not blame you), but still you're mine."

He was very handsome as he stood upon the floor resolute, something of the savage and the dandy, a man compelling. Nan felt the tremor of an admiration, though the insult was yet burning on her countenance.

"Here's my father," she said, quickly sitting at the harpsichord again, with her face away from it and the candle-light. Into the room stepped the General, never knowing he had come upon a storm. Their silence surprised him. He looked suspiciously at the lad, who still stood on the floor with his hat in his hand.

"You're not going yet, Islay?" said he, and there was no answer.

"Have you two quarrelled?" he asked, again glancing at his daughter's averted face.

Young Islay stammered his reply. "I have been a fool, General, that's all," said he. "I brought the manners of the Inn, as your daughter says, into your house, and—"

The father caught him by the sleeve and bent a most stern eye.

"Well, well?" he pushed.

"And—the rest, I think, should be between yourself and me," said Young Islay, looking at Nan now with her back to them, and he and the father went out of the room.



CHAPTER XXV—THE EAVESDROPPER

There was no moon, but the sky hung thick with stars, and the evening was a rare dusk where bush and tree stood half revealed, things sinister, concealing the terrific elements of dreams. Over the hills came Gilian, a passionate pilgrim of the night. The steeps, the gullies, the hazel thickets he trod were scarcely real for him, he passed them as if in a swoon, he felt himself supreme, able to step from ben to ben, inspired by the one exaltation that puts man above all toils, fears, weariness and doubts, brother of the April eagle, cousin-german of the remote and soaring star.

He approached the house of Maam by a rough sheep-path along the side of the burn, leaped from boulder to boulder to keep the lights of the house in view, brushed eagerly through the bracken, ran masterfully in the flats. When he came close to the house, caution was necessary lest late harvesters should discover him. He went round on the outside of the orchard hedge, behind the milk-house wall, and stood in the concealment of a little alder planting. The house was lit in several windows, it struck—thought he—warm upon a neck and flashed back in a melting eye within; his heart drummed furiously.

In the farmyard the workers were preparing to depart for the night from their long day of toil. All but the last of the horses had been stabled; the shepherds were returning from the fanks; two women, the weariness of their bodies apparent in their attitudes even in the dusk, stood for a little in the yard, then with arms round each other's waists went towards the cot-house, singing softly as they went. The General's voice in Gaelic rose over all but the river's murmur, as he called across the wattle gate to a herd-boy bearing in peat for the night and morning fires. And the night was all wrapt in an odour of bog myrtle and flowers.

That outer world, for once, had no interest for Gilian; his eyes were on the windows, and though the interior of Maam was utterly unknown to him from actual sight, he was fancying it in every detail. He knew the upper room where Nan slept; he had watched the light come to it and disappear, every night since she had returned, though he could not guess how in that eminent flame she was reading the memorials, the letters, the diaries of her lost lowland life and weeping for her solitude.

The light was not there now; it was too early in the evening, so she must be in the room whose two windows shone on the grass between the house and the barn. He could see them plainly as he stood in the planting, and he busied himself, forgetting all the outside interests of the house, in picturing its interior. Nan, he told himself, sat sewing or reading within, still the tall lady of his day-dreams, for he had not yet seen her since her return.

And then he heard her harpsichord, its unfamiliar music amazing him by its relation to some world he did not know, the world from which she had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed only to rough men's voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with associations of life genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan so far removed as then from him, the home-staying dreamer. Up rose his startled judgment and called him fool.

But hark! her voice came in and joined the harpsichord—surely this time he was not mistaken? Her voice! it was certainly her voice! He held his breath to listen for fear he should lose the softest note as it came from her lips. Now he was well repaid for his nights of traverse on the hills, his watching, his disappointment! The very night held breath to listen to that song, not the song that had been sung in the Jean, but another, the song of a child no more, but of a woman, full of passion, antique love and sorrow, of the unsatisfied and yearning years.

The music ceased; the night for a space swooned into a numb and desolate silence. Then in the field behind, the last corncrake harshly called; a shepherd whistled on his dogs; a cart rumbled over the cobbles, making for the shed. The sound of the river as it came to him among the alder-trees seemed the sound the wave makes in the ears of the sinking and exhausted swimmer.

Gilian turned over in his pocket a lucky flint arrowhead, and wished for a glimpse of Nan.

He had no sooner done so than her shadow showed upon the blind, hurried and nervous as in some affright.

His heart leaped; he made a step forward as if he would storm that citadel of his fancy, but he checked himself on a saner thought that he was imbuing the shadow with fears that were not there. He drew a deep breath and turned his lucky arrowhead again. For a second or two there was no response. Then another shadow came upon the blinds—a man's, striding for a little back and forward, as if in perturbation. Who could it be? the trembling outsider asked himself. Not the father; there was no queue to the shadow, and a vague suggestion of the General's voice had come but a moment before from another part of the steading. Not the uncle? This was no long, bent, bearded apparition, but the figure of youth. Gilian promptly fancied himself the substance of the shadow in that envied light and presence, seeing the glow of fire and candle in Nan's eyes as she turned to the accepted lover. "Nan, Nan!" he whispered, "I love you! I love you!"

A faint breath from a new point came through the trees, the dryads sighing for all this pitiful illusion. It struck chill upon his face; he shivered and prepared to set off for home across the hill. A last reluctant glance was thrown at the window, and he had turned towards the milk-house wall when a sound of opening doors arrested him. Now he could not escape unobserved; he withdrew into the shadow of the trees again.

The General and another came out and stood midway between the house and the planting. There they spoke in constrained words that did not at first reach him. Against the grey dun of the sky he could separate their figures, but he could not guess the identity of the General's companion.

In a second or two they moved nearer and he was an unwilling listener, though a keenly interested one.

"Come, come," said the General, in a tone of some annoyance, "you had me out to hear your explanation, and now I'm to be kept chittering in the night air till you range your inside for words."

The other murmured something in a voice that did not intelligently reach the planting.

"Ay, you did, did you?" said the General in reply, very dryly, and then he paused. "I'll warrant you found a tartar," he said in a little.

The other answered softly in a word or two.

There was another pause, and then the General laughed, not with much geniality. "That was all the news you brought me out here for?" said he. "Come, come, the lady can look after herself so far as that goes. Either that or she's not her mother's child. And yet—and yet, I would not be saying. Edinburgh and all their low-country notions make some difference; I see them in her. This is not the girl I sent off south on a mail-gig—just like a parcel. Curse the practice that we must be risking the things of our affection among strangers!"

There was no more than the brief and muffled answer, like that of a man ashamed.

"I've seen that before," said the General stiffly. "It's not uncommon at the age, but it's unusual to take the old gentleman into the garden at night without his bonnet to tell him so little as that."

The answer, still muffled to the listener in the planting, poured forth quickly.

"Highland," said the General, "queer Highlands! And it must be now or never with us, must it? Well, young gentleman, you have nerve at least," and he quoted a Gaelic proverb. He put his hand on the shoulder of the other and leaned to whisper. Gilian could make the action out against the sky. Then "Good-night" and the father's footsteps went back to the door and the unknown proceeded down the glen.

On an impulse irresistible, Gilian followed at a discreet distance, keeping on the verges of the grass beside the road, so that his footsteps might not betray him. All the night was tenantless but for themselves and some birds that called dolefully in the woods. The river, broadened by the burns on either hand that joined it, grew soon to a rapid and tumultuous current washing round the rushy bends, and the Dhu Loch when they came to it had a ripple on its shore, so that they were at the bridge and yet the one who led was not aware that he was followed. He leaned upon the crenelated parapet and hummed a strain of song as Gilian came up to him with a swinging step, now on the footway.

Young Islay started at this approach without warning, but he was not afraid. He peered into Gilian's face when he had come up to him.

"Oh, you!" said he. "I got quite a start, I thought at first it was Drimmin dorran's ghost." This, laughingly, of a shade with a reputation for haunting these evening solitudes.

"You're late on the road?" he went on curiously.

"No later than yourself," answered Gilian, vaguely grieving to find that this was the substance of his shadow on the blind and the audience for Miss Nan's entertainment.

"Oh! I was—I was on a visit," said Young Islay. He went closer up to Gilian and added eagerly, as one glad to unbosom, "Man! did you ever hear—did you ever hear Miss Nan sing?"

"Long ago," said Gilian; "it's an old story." "Lucky man!" said Young Islay enviously, "to be here so long to listen when I was far away."

"She was away herself a good deal," said Gilian, "but when we heard her we quite appreciated our opportunities, I assure you."

"Did you, faith?" said Young Islay, with a jealous tone. "You seem," he went on, "to have made very little use of them. I wonder where the eyes of you could be. I never saw her, really, till an hour or two ago. I never heard her sing before, but yet, some way——" He hesitated in embarrassment.

Gilian made no answer. He felt it the most natural thing in the world that any one seeing and hearing Nan should appreciate herself and her singing. There was no harm in that.

The night was solemn with the continual cry of the owls that abound in the woody shoulder of Duntorvil; a sweet balmy influence loaded the air, stars gathered in patches between drifts of cloud. For some distance the young men walked together silent, till Young Islay spoke.

"I've been away seeing the world," said he hurriedly, like a man at a confession, "not altogether with my father's wish, who would sooner I stayed at home and farmed Drimlee; moving from garrison to garrison, giving my mind no hearth to stay at for more than a night at a time, and I've been missing the chance of my life. I went up the way there an hour or two since—Young Islay, a soldier, coarse, ashamed of sentiment, and now I go down another man altogether. I would not say it to any one but yourself; you're a sort of sentimental person in a wholesale way; you'll understand. Eh, what? You'll understand!" He threw out his chest; breathed fully. "I'm a new man, I'm telling you. I wonder where the eyes of you fellows were?"

Even yet Gilian did not grudge Young Islay the elation that was so manifest.

"You understand, we did not see much of her in these parts lately, much more than yourself. I have not seen her myself since she returned. Has she changed much?"

"Much!" exclaimed Young Islay, laughing. "My son! she is not the girl I knew at all. When I went in there—into the room up, there you know, I was—I was—baffled to know her. I think I expected to see the same girl I had—I had—you mind, brought the boat out to, the same loose hair, the same—you know, I never expected to see a princess in Maam. A princess, mind you, and she looked all the more that because her uncle met me at the stair-foot as I was going in. A sour old scamp yon! He was teasing out his beard, and, 'A nice piece there,' said he, nodding at the door, 'and I'm sure her father would be glad to have her off his hands.' I laughed and——"

"I would have struck him on the jaw," said Gilian with great heat.

"Oh!" said Young Islay, astonishment in his voice. He said no more for a little. Then, "I was not very well pleased myself with the remark when I went into the room and saw the lady it referred to. You're not—you're not chief in that quarter, are you?"

"Chief!" repeated Gilian. "You're ahead of me even in seeing the lady."

"Oh well, that's all right," said Young Islay, seemingly relieved. "Look here; I'm gone, that's the long and the short of it! I'm seeing a week or two of hard work before me convincing her ladyship that a young ensign in a marching regiment is maybe worth her smiling on."

Gilian turned cold with apprehension. This, indeed, was a revelation of love-making in garrison fashion.

"You don't know the girl at all," he said.

"So much the better," said Young Islay; "that means that she does not know me, and that's all the better start for me, perhaps. It's a great advantage, for I've noticed that they're all the most interested—the sex of them—in a novelty. I have a better chance than the best man in these parts, that has been under her eye all the time I was away. I'll have stiff work, perhaps, but I want her, and between ourselves, and not to make a brag of it, I'll have her. Youll not breathe that," he added, turning in apprehension, stopping opposite Gilian and putting his hand on his coat lapel. "I am wrong to mention it at all even to you, but I must out with what I feel to somebody. The thing is dirling in my blood. Listen, do you hear that?" He threw out his chest again, held his breath, and Gilian could almost swear he heard his heart throb with feeling.

"Does she want you? That's the question, I suppose," said Gilian weakly.

"That is not the question at all, it's do I want her? There must be a beginning somewhere. Look at me; I'm strong, young, not very ugly (at least they tell me), I'm the grandson of Long Islay, who had a name for gallantry; the girl has no lover—Has she?" he asked eagerly, suddenly dropping his confidence.

"Not that I'm aware of," said Gilian.

"Well, there you are! What more is to be said? In these things one has but to wish and win—at least that's been my training and my conviction. Here she's lonely—I could see it in her; the company of her father is not likely to be long for her, and her Uncle Jamie is not what you would call a cheerful spark. Upon my soul, I believe I could get her if I was a hunchback.... Mind, I'm not lightlying the lady; I could not do that in this mood, but I'm fair taken with her; she beats all ever I saw. You know the feeling? No, you don't; you're too throng at book notions. God! God! God! I'm all ashake!"

He looked at Gilian, trying in the dark to make out how he was taking this, to make sure he was not laughing at him. Gilian, on the contrary, was feeling very solemn. He felt that this was a dangerously effective mood for a lover, and he knew the lad before him would always bring it to actual wooing if it got that length. He had no answer, and Young Islay again believed him the abstracted dreamer.

"I have this advantage," he went on, unable to resist. "She likes soldiers; she said as much; it was in her mother and in her; she likes action, she likes spirit. She has them herself in faith! she almost boxed my ears when—when—but I could swear she was rather tickled at my impudence."

"Your impudence!" repeated Gilian, "were you in that mood?"

"Oh, well, you know—I had the boldness to——

"To what?" said Gilian; apprehending some disaster.

"Just a trifle," said Young Islay, shrewdly affecting indifference. "A soldier's compliment; we are too ready with them in barrack-yards, you know." And he sighed as he remembered the red ripe lips, the warm breath on his face, and the tingling influence of the skin he touched under the kerchief.

They walked on in silence again for a while. The night grew dark with gathering clouds. Lights far out at sea showed the trailing fishers; a flaring torch told of a trawler's evening fortune made already. And soon they were at the Duke's lodge and Gilian's way up Glen Aray lay before him. He was pausing to say good-night, confused, troubled by what he had heard, feeling he must confess his own regard for the girl and not let this comparative stranger so buoyantly outdo him in admiration.

"Now," said he, hesitating, "what would you think I was in Glen Shira myself for?"

"Eh?" said Young Islay, scarcely hearing, and he hummed the refrain of the lady's song.

"In Glen Shira; what was I doing there?" repeated Gilian. He wanted no answer. "It was on the odd chance that I might see Miss Nan. We are not altogether without some taste in these parts, though wanting the advantage of travel and garrison gallantry. I was in the garden when you were inside. I heard her singing, and I think I got closer on herself and her song than you did."

"My dear Gilian," said Young Islay, "I once fought you for less than that." He laughed as he said it. "If you mean," he went on, "that you are in love with Miss Nan, that's nothing to wonder at, the miracle would be for you to be indifferent. We're in the same hunt, are we then? Well, luck to the winner! I can say no fairer than that. Only you'll have to look sharp, my boy, for I'm not going to lose any time, I assure you. If you're going to do all your courtship of yon lady from outside her window, you'll not make much progress, I'm thinking. Good-night; good-night!" He went off laughing, and when he had gone away a few yards Gilian, walking slowly homewards, heard him break whistling into the air that Nan had sung in the parlour of Maam.



CHAPTER XXVI—AGAIN IN THE GARDEN

Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay's corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over the bridge whence she must sometime come. Years after he would stop again upon the blue slab and recall with a pensive pleasure those old hours of expectation.

For days he loitered in vain, the wonder of the Inns and its frequenters. Nan never appeared. To her father a letter had come; the Duke had come up on the back of it; there had been long discourse and a dram of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his Grace's cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower on Nan as he passed into the house behind her father, and come out anon smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her father would have her constant in his sight, though it was only, as it seemed, to pleasure an averted eye.

By-and-by Gilian turned his lucky flint one morning in a fortunate inspiration, and had no sooner done so than he remembered a very plausible excuse for going to a farm at the very head of Glen Shira. He started forth with the certainty, somehow, that he should meet the lady at last.

He had transacted his business and was on his way to the foot of the glen when he came upon her at Boshang Gate. Her back was to him; she was looking out to sea, leaning upon the bars as if she were a weary prisoner.

She turned at the sound of his footstep, a stranger utterly to his eyes and imagination, but not to his instinct, her hair bound, her apparel mature and decorous, her demeanour womanly. And he had been looking all the while for a little girl grown tall, with no external difference but that!

She took an impulsive step towards him as he hesitated with his hand dubious between his side and his bonnet, a pleasant, even an eager smile upon her face.

"You are quite sure you are you?" she said, holding out her hand before he had time to say a word. "For I was standing there thinking of you, a little white-faced fellow in a kilt, and here comes your elderly wraith at my back like one of Black Duncan's ghosts!"

"I would be the more certain it was myself," he answered, "if you had not been so different from what I expected."

"Oh! then you had not forgotten me altogether?" she said, waiting her answer, a mere beginner in coquetry emboldened to practice by the slightly rustic awkwardness of the lad.

"Not—not altogether," said he, unhappily accepting the common locution of the town, that means always more than it says.

A spark of humour flashed to merriment in her eyes and died to a demure ember again before he noticed it. "Here's John Hielan'man," she said to herself, and she recalled, not to Gilian's credit in the comparison, the effrontery of Young Islay.

The situation was a little awkward, for he held her hand too long, taking all the pleasure he could from a sudden conviction that in all the times he had seen Glen Shira it had never seemed fully furnished and habitable till now. This creature, so much the mistress of herself, and dainty and cheerful, made up for all its solitude; she was the one thing (he felt) wanting to make complete the landscape.

Her blush and a feeble effort to disengage her hand brought him to himself.

"I am pleased to see you back," said he shyly, as he released her. "I had not forgotten—oh no, I had not forgotten you. It would be easy to convince you of that, I think, but in all my recollection of Miss Nan I had more of the girl in the den of the Jean in my mind than the Edinburgh lady."

"You'll be meaning that I am old and—and pretty no longer," said she. "Upon my word, you are honestly outspoken in these parts nowadays." She pouted, with lines of annoyance upon her brow, which seriously disturbed him, and so obviously that she was compelled to laugh.

Not a word could he find to say to raillery which was quite new to him, and so for the sake of both of them as they stood at the gate Miss Nan had to ply an odd one-sided conversation till he found himself at his ease. By-and-by his shyness forsook him.

The sun was declining; the odours of the traffic of peace blew from the land; one large and ruddy star lit over Strone. The fishers raised their sails, and as their prows beat the sea they chanted the choruses of the wave.

A recollection of all this having happened before seized them together; she looked at him with a smile upon her lips, and he was master of her thought before she had expressed it.

"I know exactly what you are thinking of," he said.

"It was the odd thing about you that you often did," she replied. "It's a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan'man," she thought.

"You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke's garden," he said. "It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I'm as old—as old as the hills." He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with brass. "As old as the hills," he went on, eager to display himself, and also to show he appreciated her advantages. "Do you know I begin to find them irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body, like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the glens."

She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to some women makes a strange appeal.

"One sees much among strangers," she confessed. "I thought you had been out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked of the army for you?"

"The army," he said, wincing imperceptibly. "Oh! that was the Paymaster's old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it was?" He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.

"No, tell me," she said.

"It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed, shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least, when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that was the very last of the army for me."

"I don't understand it," she said.

"Nor I," he confessed frankly; "only there's the fact! All I know is that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before, night and day."

"I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be the thing in actuality."

"I remember that too. Dhe! how the whole thing comes back! I wonder—"

"Well!" she pressed.

"I wonder if we walked in the Duke's garden again, if we could restore the very feelings of that time—the innocence and ignorance of it?"

"I don't know that I want to do so," said she, laughing.

"Might we not——" He paused, afraid of his own temerity.

"Try it, you were going to say," she continued.

"You see I have little of your own gift. I'm willing. I am going to the town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not."

Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though she was saying "John Hielan'man, John Hielan'man!" to herself most of the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer—little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.

They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the flowers grew thick on the dykes; the tall trees swayed their boughs: still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they were trying to recall.

"It is all just as it was," said she. "All just as it was; there are the very flowers I plucked," and she bent and plucked them again.

"We can never pluck our flowers twice," said he. "The flowers you gathered then are ghosts."

"Not a bit," said she. "Here they are re-born," and she went as before from bush to bush and bank to bank, humming a strain of sailor song.

They went under the trees on which he had fancied his heron's nest, and they looked at each other, laughing.

"Wasn't I a young fool?" he asked. "I was full of dream and conceit in those days."

"And now?" she asked, burying her face in the flowers and eyeing him wonderingly.

"Oh, now," said he, "I have lost every illusion." "Or changed them for others, perhaps." He started at the suggestion. "I suppose you are right, after all," he said. "I'm still in a measure the child of fancy. This countryside moves me—I could tenant it with a thousand tales; never a wood or thicket in it but is full of song. I love it all, and yet it is my torture. When I was a child the Paymaster once got me on the bridge crying my eyes out over the screech of a curlew—that has been me all through life—I must be wondering at the hidden meanings of things. The wind in the winter trees, the gossip of the rivers, the trail of clouds, waves washing the shore at night—all these things have a tremendous importance to me. And I must laugh to see my neighbours making a to-do about a mercantile bargain. Well, I suppose it is the old Highlands in me, as Miss Mary says." "I have felt a little of it in a song," said Nan. "You could scarce do otherwise to sing them as you do," he answered. "I never heard you yet but you had the magic key for every garden of fancy. One note, one phrase of yours comes up over and over again that seems to me filled with the longings of thousand years."

He turned on her suddenly a face strenuous, eyes led with passion.

"I wish! I wish!" said he all fervent, "I wish could fathom the woman within."

"Here she's on the surface," said Nan, a little impatiently, arranging her flowers. And then she looked him straight in the eyes. "Ladyfield seems a poor academy," she said, "if it taught you but to speculate on things unfathomable. I always preferred the doer to the dreamer. The mind of man is a far more interesting thing than the song of the river I'm thinking, or the trailing of mist. And woman——" she laughed and paused.

"Well?" He eyed her robust and wholesome figure.

"Should I expose my sex, John Hielan'man, or should I not?" she reflected with an amused look in her face yet. "Never bother to look below the surface for us," she said. "We are better pleased, and you will speed the quicker to take us for what we seem. What matters of us is—as it is with men too—plain enough on the surface. Dear, dear! what nonsense to be on! You are far too much of the mist and mountain for me. As if I had not plenty of them up in Maam! Oh! I grow sick of them!" She began to walk faster, forgetting his company in the sudden remembrance of her troubles; and he strode awkwardly at her heels, not very dignified, like a menial overlooked. "They hang about the place like a menace," said she. "No wonder mother died! If she was like me she must have been heart-broken when father left her to face these solitudes."

"It is so, it is so," confessed the lad. "But they would not be wearisome with love. With love in that valley it would smile like an Indian plain."

"How do you ken?" said she, stopping suddenly at this.

"It would make habitable and even pleasant," said he, "a dwelling where age and bitterness had their abode."

"Faith, you're not so blate as I thought you!" she said, setting aside the last of her affected shy simplicity.

"Blate!" he repeated, "I would not have thought that was my failing. Am I not cracking away to you like an old wife?"

"Just to hide the blateness of you," she answered. "You may go to great depths with hills and heughs and mists—and possibly with women too when you get the chance, but, my dear Gilian, you're terribly shallow to any woman with an eye in her head."

"Did you say 'Gilian'?" he asked, stopping and looking at her with a high colour.

"Did I?" she repeated, biting her lips. "What liberty!"

"No, no," he cried——

"I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you object——"

He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him, and she laughed. All her assurance was back to her, she knew the young gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.

"Well, well," she went on after a silence, "you seem poorly provided with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would be making love to me by this time."

He stared at her aghast. "But, but——"

"But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can assure you." This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the policies.

They reached the Lady's Linn, but did not repeat old history to the extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested it in a momentary boldness.

"No, no," said she. "We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson's. And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram's stories here; what was it again?"

He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale's Daughter. She listened attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put into the narrative.

"It is a kind of gruesome fable," she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. "The other brother was Death, wasn't he? When you told it to me last I did not understand."

They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so bewildered them before: "After all, it is not a bit like what it was," said she. "I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time."

"Just so," he answered, "but you could see over no bushes in those days, and more's the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke's garden as well as in life, for it's only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan."

"Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John Hielan'man." But this was to herself.

"Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?"

"The same and not all the same," he admitted. "I can make it exactly the same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other way, some sad way I cannot explain."

The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees. There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady's breathing, that to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers. And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other rumour to the ear.

"Listen," said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that grey grassy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady's arm.

"Faith, and you are not blate," said she whimsically, but indifferent to remove herself from a grasp so innocent.

She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature. A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt attention. She withdrew her arm gently.

"Hush, hush!" he said. "Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?"

"I do?" she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly sense of laughter as at a child "Bees and midges, late things like ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies."

"They are, of course they are," he protested, laughing. "At least a second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet"—his humour came back—"even yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other path."

"What, and waste ten minutes more!" she cried "Follow me, follow me!"

And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself, very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity. He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book again to please or to deceive the Philistine.

"I thought we could bring it all back again—that was the object of my rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past."

They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.

"And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you ever written anything?"

He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he had read in Marget Maclean's books that were still the favourites of his leisure hours.

"It'll be in that like other things," she said with some sense of her own cruelty. "You must be dreaming it when you might be making it."

"I never had the inspiration——"

"What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!" she pointed out.

"But now, of course—-"

"Just the weather, Gilian," she hastened to interject. "A bonny night with stars, the scent of flower, a misty garden—I could find some inspiration in them myself for poetry, and I make no pretence at it."

"There was a little more," he said meaningly; "but no matter, that may wait," and he proceeded immediately to the making of a poem as he went, the subject a night of stars and a maiden. They had got into the dark upper end of the town overhung by the avenue trees, the lands were spotted with the lemon lights of the evening candles, choruses came from the New Inns where fishermen from Cowal met to spend a shilling or two in the illusion of joy. Mr. Spencer saw them as he passed and was suffused by a kindly glow of uncommon romance. He saw, as he thought, a pair made for each other because they were of an age and of a size (as if that meant much); what should they be but lovers coming from the gardens of Duke George in such a night and the very heavens twinkling with the courtship of the stars? He looked and sighed. Far off in the south was an old tale of his own; the lady upstairs eternally whining because she must be banished to the wilds away from her roaring native city was not in it. "Lucky lad!" said he to himself. "He is not so shy as we thought him." They came for a moment under the influence of the swinging lamp above his door, then passed into the dusk. He went into his public room, and "Mary," he cried to a maid, "a little drop of the French for Sergeant Cameron and me. You will allow me, Sergeant? I feel a little need of an evening brace." And he drank, for the sake of bygone dusks, with his customer.

Nan and Gilian now walked on the pavement, a discreet distance apart. She stopped at the mantua-makers door. He lingered on the parting, eager to prolong it. The street was deserted; from the Sergeant More's came the sound of song; some fallen leaves ran crisp along the stones, blown by an air of wind. He had her by the hand, still loath to leave, when suddenly the door of the mantua-maker's opened and out came a little woman, who, plunging from the splendour of two penny dips into the outer mirk, ran into his arms before she noticed his presence. She drew back with an apology uttered in Gaelic in her hurried perturbation. It was Miss Mary.

"Auntie," he said, no more.

She glanced at his companion and started as if in fear, shivered, put out a hand and bade her welcome home.

"Dear me! Miss Nan," said she, "amn't I proud to see you back? What a tall lady you have grown, and so like—so like——" She stopped embarrassed.

Her hand had gone with an excess of kindness upon the girl's arm ere she remembered all that lay between them and the heyday of another Nan than this. Of Gilian she seemed to take no notice, which much surprised him with a sense of something wanting.

At last they parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster's house.



CHAPTER XXVII—ALARM

Nan's uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature's caprice with sheep and crop, man's injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons, nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life's dolours, would be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard—a fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man's face—he looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable, then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more than ever.

He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a tryst of her own making. She was indifferent—I have no excuse for her, and she's my poor heroine—about his wasted hours so long as she had her days illumined by some flicker of life and youth. He never knew how often it was from weeping over a letter from Edinburgh, or a song familiar elsewhere, upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam—and Young Islay was for reasons away in the Lowlands—this dreamer of the wild, with the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts. So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers have ever been meeting in the woods of these glens without saying to each other why.

Gilian went little to town in that weather, he was getting credit with Miss Mary, if not with her brothers, for a new interest in his profession. Nor did Nan. Her father did not let her go much without himself, he had his own reasons for keeping her from hearing the gossip of the streets.

A week or two passed. The corn, in the badger's moon, yellowed and hung; silent days of heat haze, all breathless, came on the country; the stubble fields filled at evening with great flights of birds moving south. A spirit like Nan's, that must ever be in motion, could not but irk to share such a doleful season; she went more than ever about the house of Maam sighing for lost companions, and a future not to be guessed at. Only she would cheer up when she had her duties done for the afternoon and could run out to the hillside to meet Gilian if he were there.

She was thus running, actually with a song on her lips, one day, when she ran into the arms of her uncle as he came round the corner of the barn.

"Where away?" said he shortly, putting her before him, with his hands upon her shoulders.

She reddened, but answered promptly, for there was nothing clandestine in her meetings on the bare hillside with Gilian.

"The berries again," she said. "Some of the people from Glen Aray are coming over."

"Some of the people," he repeated ironically; "that means one particular gentleman. My lassie, there's an end coming to that."

He drew a large-jointed coarse hand through his tangled beard and chuckled to himself.

"Are you aware of that?" he went on. "An end coming to it. Oh! I see things; I'm no fool: I could have told your father long ago, but he's putting an end to it in his own way, and for his own reasons."

"I have no idea what you mean," she said, surprised at the portentous tone. She was not a bit afraid of him, though he was so little in sympathy with her youth, so apparently in antagonism to her.

"What would you say to a man?" he asked cunningly.

"It would depend, uncle," she said readily and cheerfully, though a sudden apprehension smote her at the heart. "It would depend on what he said to me first."

The old man grinned callously as the only person in the secret.

"Suppose he said: 'Come away home, wife, I've paid a bonny penny for ye'?"

"Perhaps I would say, if I was in very good humour at the time, 'You've got a bonny wife for your bonny penny.' More likely I would be throwing something at him, for I have my Uncle Jamie's temper they say, but I'm nobody's wife, and for want of the asking I'm not likely to be."

"Well, we'll see," said the uncle oracularly. Then abruptly, "Have you heard that your father's got an appointment?"

"I—I heard just a hint of it, of course he has not told me all about it yet," she answered with a readiness that surprised herself when she reflected on it later, for the news now so unexpectedly given her in the momentary irritation of the old man was news indeed, and though she was unwilling to let him see that it was so, a tremendous oppression seized her; now she was to be lonely indeed. Half uttering her thoughts she said, "I'll sooner go with him than stay here and——"

"Oh, there's no going yonder," said the uncle. "Sierra Leone is not a healthy clime for men, let alone for women. That's where the man comes in. He could hardly leave you alone to stravaige about the hills there with all sorts of people from Glen Aray."

"The white man's grave!" said she, appalled.

"Ay!" said he, "but he's no ordinary white man; he's of good stock."

"And—and—he has found a man for me," she said bitterly. "Could I not be left to find one for myself?"

Her uncle laughed his hoarse rude laugh again, and still combed his tangled beard.

"Not to his fancy," he answered. "It's not every one who would suit." He smiled grimly—a wicked elder man. "It's not every one would suit," he repeated—as if he was anxious to let the full significance of what he meant sink to her understanding. And he combed his rough beard with large-jointed knotted fingers, and looked from under his heavy eyebrows.

"Seeing the business is so commercial," said she, "I'm sure that between the two of you you will make a good bargain. I am not sure but I might be glad to be anywhere out of this if father's gone and I not with him." She said it with outer equanimity, and unable to face him a moment longer without betraying her shame and indignation, she left him and went to the corn-field where Black Duncan was working alone.

That dark mariner was to some extent a grieved sharer of her solitude in Maam. The loss of the Jean on Ealan Dubh had sundered him for ever from his life of voyaging. The distant ports in whose dusks wild beasts roared and spices filled the air were far back in another life for him; even the little trips to the Clyde were, in the regrets of memory, experiences most precious. Now he had to wear thick shoes on the hill of Maam or sweat like a common son of the shore in the harvest-fields. At night upon his pillow in the barn loft he would lie and mourn for unreturning days and loud and clamorous experience. Or at morning ere he started the work of the day he would ascend the little tulloch behind the house and look far off at a patch of blue—the inner arm of the ocean.

Nan found him in one of his cranky moods, fretful at circumstances, and at her father who kept him there on the shore, and had no word of another ship to take the place of the Jean. Of late he had been worse than usual, for he had learned that the master was bound for abroad, and though he was a sure pensioner so long as Maam held together, it meant his eternal severance from the sea and ships.

Nan threw herself upon the grass beside him as he twisted hay-bands for the stacks, and said no more than "Good afternoon" for a little.

He gloomed at her, and hissed between his teeth a Skye pibroch. For a time he would have her believe he was paying no attention, but ever and anon he would let slip a glance of inquiry from the corner of his eyes. He was not too intent upon his own grievances to see that she was troubled with hers, but he knew her well enough to know that she must introduce them herself if they were to be introduced at all.

He changed his tune, let a little more affability come into his face, and it was an old air of her childhood on the Jean he had at his lips. As he whistled it he saw a little moisture at her eyes; she was recalling the lost old happiness of the days when she had gone about with that song at her lips. But he knew her better than to show that he perceived it.

"Have you heard that father's going away, Duncan?" she asked in a little.

"I have been hearing that for five years," said he shortly. He had not thought her worries would have been his own like this.

"Yes, but this time he goes."

"So they're telling me," said Black Duncan.

He busied himself more closely than ever with his occupation.

"Do you think he should be taking me?" she asked in a little.

He stopped his work immediately, and looked up startled.

"The worst curse!" said he in Gaelic. "He could not be doing that. He goes to the Gold Coast. Do I not know it—the white man's grave?"

"But this Glen Shira," said she, pretending merriment, "it's the white girl's grave for me, Duncan. Should not I be glad to be getting out of it?" And now her eyes were suffused with tears though her lips were smiling.

"I know, I know," said he, casting a glance up that lone valley that was so much their common grief. "And could we not be worse? I'm sure Black Duncan, reared in a bothy in Skye, who has been tossed by the sea, and been wet and dry in all airts of the world, would be a very thankless man if he was not pleased to be here safe and comfortable, on a steady bed at night, and not heeding the wind nor the storm no more than if he was a skart."

"Oh! you're glad enough to be here, then?" said she.

"Am I?" said he. And he sighed, so comical a sound from that hard mariner that she could not but laugh in spite of the anxieties oppressing her.

"I'm not going with him," she proceeded.

"I know," said he. "At least I heard—I heard otherwise, and I wondered when you said it, thinking perhaps you had made him change his mind."

"You thought I had made him change—what do you mean?" she pressed, feeling herself on the verge of an explanation, but determined not to ask directly.