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The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story

by S. R. Crockett · English · Gutenberg #4918 · 525,379 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story

Author: S. R. Crockett


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #4918]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4918

Credits: This eBook was produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LILAC SUNBONNET: A LOVE STORY ***




This eBook was produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.



THE LILAC SUNBONNET

A LOVE STORY

BY S. R. CROCKETT

AUTHOR OF THE STICKIT MINISTER, THE RAIDERS, ETC.





CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE.--BY THE WAYSIDE
       I.--THE BLANKET-WASHING
      II.--THE MOTHER OF KING LEMUEL
     III.--A TREASURE-TROVE
      IV.--A CAVALIER PURITAN
       V.--A LESSON IN BOTANY
      VI.--CURLED EYELASHES
     VII.--CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE
    VIII.--THE MINISTER'S MAN ARMS FOR CONQUEST
      IX.--THE ADVENT OF THE CUIF
       X.--THE LOVE-SONG OF THE MAVIS
      XI.--ANDREW KISSOCK GOES TO SCHOOL
     XII.--MIDSUMMER DAWN
    XIII.--A STRING OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET
     XIV.--CAPTAIN AGNEW GREATORIX
      XV.--ON THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD
     XVI.--THE CUIF BEFORE THE SESSION
    XVII.--WHEN THE KYE COMES HAME
   XVIII.--A DAUGHTER OF THE PlCTS
     XIX.--AT THE BARN END
      XX.-"DARK-BROWED EGYPT"
     XXI.--THE RETURN OF EBIE FARRISH
    XXII.--A SCARLET POPPY
   XXIII.--CONCERNING JOHN BAIRDIESON
    XXIV.--LEGITIMATE SPORT
     XXV.--BARRIERS BREAKING
    XXVI.--SUCH SWEET PERIL
   XXVII.--THE OPINIONS OF SAUNDERS MOWDIEWORT UPON BESOM-SHANKS
  XXVIII.--THAT GIPSY JESS
    XXIX.--THE DARK OF THE MOON AT THE GRANNOCH BRIDGE
     XXX.--THE HILL GATE
    XXXI.--THE STUDY OF THE MANSE OF DULLARG
   XXXII.--OUTCAST AND ALIEN FROM THE COMMONWEALTH
  XXXIII.--JOCK GORDON TAKES A HAND
   XXXIV.--THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH
    XXXV.--SUCH SWEET SORROW
   XXXVI.--OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
  XXXVII.--UNDER THE RED HEATHER
 XXXVIII.--BEFORE THE REFORMER'S CHAIR
   XXXIX.--JEMIMA, KEZIA, AND LITTLE KEREN-HAPPUCH
      XL.--A TRIANGULAR CONVERSATION
     XLI.--THE MEETING OF THE SYNOD
    XLII.--PURGING AND RESTORATION
   XLIII.--THREADS DRAWN TOGETHER
    XLIV.--WINSOME'S LAST TRYST
     XLV.--THE LAST OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET





PROLOGUE.

BY THE WAYSIDE


As Ralph Peden came along the dusty Cairn Edward road from the
coach which had set him down there on its way to the Ferry town,
he paused to rest in the evening light at the head of the Long
Wood of Larbrax. Here, under boughs that arched the way, he took
from his shoulders his knapsack, filled with Hebrew and Greek
books, and rested his head on the larger bag of roughly tanned
Westland leather, in which were all his other belongings. They
were not numerous. He might, indeed, have left both his bags for
the Dullarg carrier on Saturday, but to lack his beloved books for
four days was not to be thought of for a moment by Ralph Peden. He
would rather have carried them up the eight long miles to the
manse of the Dullarg one by one.

As he sat by the tipsy milestone, which had swayed sidelong and
lay half buried amid the grass and dock leaves, a tall, dark girl
came by--half turning to look at the young man as he rested. It
was Jess Kissock, from the Herd's House at Craig Ronald, on her
way home from buying trimmings for a new hat. This happened just
twice a year, and was a solemn occasion.

"Is this the way to the manse of Dullarg?" asked the young man,
standing up with his hat in his hand, the brim just beneath his
chin. He was a handsome young man when he stood up straight.

Jess looked at him attentively. They did not speak in that way in
her country, nor did they take their hats in their hands when they
had occasion to speak to young women.

"I am myself going past the Dullarg," she said, and paused with a
hiatus like an invitation.

Ralph Peden was a simple young man, but he rose and shouldered his
knapsack without a word. The slim, dark-haired girl with the
bright, quick eyes like a bird, put out her hand to take a share
of the burden of Ralph's bag.

"Thank you, but I am quite able to manage it myself," he said, "I
could not think of letting you put your hand to it."

"I am not a fine lady," said the girl, with a little impatient
movement of her brows, as if she had stamped her foot. "I am
nothing but a cottar's lassie."

"But then, how comes it that you speak as you do?" asked Ralph.

"I have been long in England--as a lady's maid," she answered with
a strange, disquieting look at him. She had taken one side of the
bag of books in spite of his protest, and now walked by Ralph's
side through the evening coolness.

"This is the first time you have been hereaway?" his companion
asked.

Ralph nodded a quick affirmative and smiled.

"Then," said Jess Kissock, the rich blood mantling her dark
cheeks, "I am the first from the Dullarg you have spoken to!"

"The very first!" said Ralph.

"Then I am glad," said Jess Kissock. But in the young man's heart
there was no answering gladness, though in very sooth she was an
exceeding handsome maid.





CHAPTER I.

THE BLANKET-WASHING.


Ralph Peden lay well content under a thorn bush above the Grannoch
water. It was the second day of his sojourning in Galloway--the
first of his breathing the heather scent on which the bees grew
tipsy, and of listening to the grasshoppers CHIRRING in the long
bent by the loch side. Yesterday his father's friend, Allan Welsh,
minister of the Marrow kirk in the parish of Dullarg, had held
high discourse with him as to his soul's health, and made many
inquiries as to how it sped in the great city with the precarious
handful of pious folk, who gathered to listen to the precious and
savoury truths of the pure Marrow teaching. Ralph Peden was
charged with many messages from his father, the metropolitan
Marrow minister, to Allan Welsh--dear to his soul as the only
minister who had upheld the essentials on that great day, when
among the assembled Presbyters so many had gone backward and
walked no more with him.

"Be faithful with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the
quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother
minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly
delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and
old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years.
"Be faithful with the young man," continued the letter; "he is
well grounded on the fundamentals; his head is filled with godly
lear, and he has sound views on the Headship; but he has always
been a little cold and distant even to me, his father according to
the flesh. With his companions he is apt to be distant and
reserved. I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in
James's Court, but to you I do not need to tell the reason of
that. The Lord give you his guidance in leading the young man in
the right way."

So far Gilbert Peden's letter had run staidly and in character
like the spoken words of the writer. But here it broke off. The
writing, hitherto fine as a hair, thickened; and from this point
became crowded and difficult, as though the floods of feeling had
broken some dam. "O man Allan, for my sake, if at all you have
loved me, or owe me anything, dig deep and see if the lad has a
heart. He shews it not to me."

So that is why Ralph Peden lies couched in the sparce bells of the
ling, just where the dry, twisted timothy grasses are beginning to
overcrown the purple bells of the heather. Tall and clean-limbed,
with a student's pallor of clear-cut face, a slightly ascetic
stoop, dark brown curls clustering over a white forehead, and eyes
which looked steadfast and true, the young man was sufficient of a
hero. He wore a broad straw hat, which he had a pleasant habit of
pushing back, so that his clustering locks fell over his brow
after a fashion which all women thought becoming. But Ralph Peden
heeded not what women thought, said, or did, for he was trysted to
the kirk of the Marrow, the sole repertory of orthodox truth in
Scotland, which is as good as saying in the wide world--perhaps
even in the universe.

Ralph Peden had dwelt all his life with his father in an old house
in James's Court, Edinburgh, overlooking the great bounding circle
of the northern horizon and the eastern sea. He had been trained
by his father to think more of a professor's opinion on his Hebrew
exercise than of a woman's opinion on any subject whatever. He had
been told that women were an indispensable part of the economy of
creation; but, though he accepted word by word the Westminster
Confession, and as an inexorable addition the confessions and
protests of the remnant of the true kirk in Scotland (known as the
Marrow kirk), he could not but consider woman a poor makeshift,
even as providing for the continuity of the race. Surely she had
not been created when God looked upon all that he had made and
found it very good. The thought preserved Ralph's orthodoxy.

Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book
and a volume which he had been studying all the way from
Edinburgh. As he lay at length among the grass he conned it over
and over. He referred to passages here and there. He set out very
calmly with that kind of determination with which a day's work in
the open air with a book is often begun. Not for a moment did he
break the monotony of his study. The marshalled columns of strange
letters were mowed down before him.

A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up
from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient,
stifled manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a
mountainous bulk. Ralph Peden rose in a hurry. The beast seemed to
be inside his coat. He had instinctively hated bees and everything
that buzzed ever since as a child he had made experiments with the
paper nest of a tree-building wasp. The humble-bee buzzed a little
more, discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last
from beneath the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair
with his feeler. Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a
meadow fox-tail grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an
elastic send-off upon his flight. With a spring he lumbered up,
taking his way over the single field which separated his house
from the edge of the Grannoch water--where on the other side,
above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so
inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the
hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the hollows of
the wood.

But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and
Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the
murmur of voices. He moved away from the humble-bee's dwelling and
established himself on a quieter slope under a bush of broom. A
whin-chat said "check, check" above him, and flirted a brilliant
tail; but Ralph Peden was not afraid of whin-chats. Here he
settled himself to study, knitting his brows and drumming on the
ground with the toe of one foot to concentrate his attention. The
whin-chat could hear him murmuring to himself at intervals,
"Surely that is the sense--it must be taken this way." Sometimes,
on the contrary, he shook his head at Luther's Commentary, which
lay on the short, warm turf before him, as if in reproof. Ralph
was of opinion that Luther, but for his great protective
reputation, and the fact that he had been dead some time, might
have been served with a libel for heresy--at least if he had
ministered to the Marrow kirk.

Then after a little he pulled his hat over his eyes to think, and
lay back till he could just see one little bit of Loch Grannoch
gleaming through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the
hillside high above it. He counted the sheep on the green field
over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked
irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no
opinions upon Luther to sober them.

Gradually a haze spun itself over the landscape, and Ralph Peden's
head slowly fell back till it rested somewhat sharply upon a
spikelet of prickly whin. His whole body sat up instantly, with an
exclamation which was quite in Luther's manner. He had not been
sleeping. He rejected the thought; yet he acknowledged that it was
nevertheless passing strange that, just where the old single-
arched bridge takes a long stride over the Grannoch lane, there
was now a great black pot a-swing above a blinking pale fire of
peats and fir-branches, and a couple of great tubs set close
together on stones which he had not seen before. There was, too, a
ripple of girls' laughter, which sent a strange stirring of
excitement along the nerves of the young man. He gathered his
books to move away; but on second thoughts, looking through the
long, swaying tendrils of the broom under which he sat, he
resolved to remain. After all, the girls might be as harmless as
his helper of yesterday.

"Yet it is most annoying," he said; "I had been quieter in James's
Court."

Still he smiled a little to himself, for the broom did not grow in
James's Court, nor the blackbirds flute their mellow whistle
there.

Loch Grannoch stretched away three miles to the south, basking in
alternate blue and white, as cloud and sky mirrored themselves
upon it. The first broad rush of the ling [Footnote: Common heath
(Erica tetralix).] was climbing the slopes of the Crae Hill above
--a pale lavender near the loch-side, deepening to crimson on the
dryer slopes where the heath-bells grew shorter and thicker
together. The wimpling lane slid as silently away from the
sleeping loch as though it were eloping and feared to awake an
angry parent. The whole range of hill and wood and water was
drenched in sunshine. Silence clothed it like a garment--save only
for the dark of the shadow under the bridge, from whence had come
that ring of girlish laughter which had jarred upon the nerves of
Ralph Peden.

Suddenly there emerged from the indigo shade where the blue
spruces overarched the bridge a girl carrying two shining pails of
water. Her arms were bare, her sleeves being rolled high above her
elbow; and her figure, tall and shapely, swayed gracefully to the
movement of the pails. Ralph did not know before that there is an
art in carrying water. He was ignorant of many things, but even
with his views on woman's place in the economy of the universe, he
could not but be satisfied with the fitness and the beauty of the
girl who came up the path, swinging her pails with the
compensatory sway of lissom body, and that strong outward flex of
the elbow which kept the brimming cans swinging in safety by her
side.

Ralph Peden never took his eyes off her as she came, the theories
of James's Court notwithstanding. Nor indeed need we for a little.
For this is Winifred, better known as Winsome Charteris, a very
important young person indeed, to whose beauty and wit the poets
of three parishes did vain reverence; and, what she might well
value more, whose butter was the best (and commanded the highest
price) of any that went into Dumfries market on Wednesdays.

Fair hair, crisping and tendrilling over her brow, swept back in
loose and flossy circlets till caught close behind her head by a
tiny ribbon of blue--then again escaping it went scattering and
wavering over her shoulders wonderingly, like nothing on earth but
Winsome Charteris's hair. It was small wonder that the local poets
grew grey before their time in trying to find a rhyme for
"sunshine," a substantive which, for the first time, they had
applied to a girl's hair. For the rest, a face rather oval than
long, a nose which the schoolmaster declared was "statuesque"
(used in a good sense, he explained to the village folk, who could
never be brought to see the difference between a statue and an
idol--the second commandment being of literal interpretation along
the Loch Grannoch side), and eyes which, emulating the parish
poet, we can only describe as like two blue waves when they rise
just far enough to catch a sparkle of light on their crests. The
subject of her mouth, though tempting, we refuse to touch. Its
description has already wrecked three promising reputations.

But withal Winsome Charteris set her pails as frankly and plumply
on the ground, as though she were plain as a pike-staff, and bent
a moment over to look into the gypsy-pot swung on its birchen
triangle. Then she made an impatient movement of her hand, as if
to push the biting fir-wood smoke aside. This angered Ralph, who
considered it ridiculous and ill-ordered that a gesture which
showed only a hasty temper and ill-regulated mind should be
undeniably pretty and pleasant to look upon, just because it was
made by a girl's hand. He was angry with himself, yet he hoped she
would do it again. Instead, she took up one pail of water after
the other, swung them upward with a single dexterous movement, and
poured the water into the pot, from which the steam was rising.
Ralph Peden could see the sunlight sparkle in the water as it
arched itself solidly out of the pails. He was not near enough to
see the lilac sprig on her light summer gown; but the lilac
sunbonnet which she wore, principally it seemed in order that it
might hang by the strings upon her shoulders, was to Ralph a
singularly attractive piece of colour in the landscape. This he
did not resent, because it is always safe to admire colour.

Ralph would have been glad to have been able to slip off quietly
to the manse. He told himself so over and over again, till he
believed it. This process is easy. But he saw very well that he
could not rise from the lee of the whin bush without being in full
view of this eminently practical and absurdly attractive young
woman. So he turned to his Hebrew Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim
contraction of determined brows which recalled his father. A
country girl was nothing to the hunter after curious roots and the
amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and Pual.

"I WILL not be distracted!" Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot,
correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant
particle through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.

A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.

"Bless me," said Ralph, startled, "this is most discomposing!"

He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of
the water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac
sunbonnet in her hand. She wared it high above her head, then she
paused a moment to look right in his direction under her hand held
level with her brows. Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a
couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had
only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the
parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat
fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the
gorse. A most revolutionary young person this. He regretted that
the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.

Ralph was deeply shocked that a girl should whistle, and still
more that she should use two fingers to do it, for all the world
like a shepherd on the hill. He bethought him that not one of his
cousins, Professor Habakkuk Thriepneuk's daughters (who studied
Chaldaeic with their father), would ever have dreamed of doing
that. He imagined their horror at the thought, and a picture,
compound of Jemima, Kezia, and Kerenhappuch, rose before him.

Down the hill, out from beneath the dark green solid foliaged
elder bushes, there came a rush of dogs.

"Save us," said Ralph, who saw himself discovered, "the deil's in
the lassie; she'll have the dogs on me!"--an expression he had
learned from John Bairdison, his father's "man," [Footnote: Church
officer and minister's servant.] who in an unhallowed youth had
followed the sea.

Then he would have reproved himself for the unlicensed exclamation
as savouring of the "minced oath," had he not been taken up with
watching the dogs. There were two of them. One was a large, rough
deerhound, clean cut about the muzzle, shaggy everywhere else,
which ran first, taking the hedges in his stride. The other was a
small, short-haired collie, which, with his ears laid back and an
air of grim determination not to be left behind, followed grimly
after. The collie went under the hedges, diving instinctively for
the holes which the hares had made as they went down to the water
for their evening drink. Both dogs crossed to windward of him,
racing for their mistress. When they reached the green level where
the great tubs stood they leaped upon her with short sharp barks
of gladness. She fended them off again with gracefully impatient
hand; then bending low, she pointed to the loch-side a quarter of
a mile below, where a herd of half a dozen black Galloway cows,
necked with the red and white of the smaller Ayrshires, could be
seen pushing its way through the lush heavy grass of the water
meadow.

"Away by there! Fetch them, Roger!" she cried. "Haud at them--the
kye's in the meadow!"

The dogs darted away level. The cows continued their slow advance,
browsing as they went, but in a little while their dark fronts
were turned towards the dogs as after a momentary indecision they
recognized an enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through
the meadow and poured across the unfenced road up to the hill
pasture which they had left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless
turned slow bovine thoughts to the coolness of the meadow grass,
and the pleasure of standing ruminant knee-deep in the river, with
wavy tail nicking the flies in the shade.

For a little while Ralph Peden breathed freely again, but his
satisfaction was short-lived. One girl was discomposing enough,
but here were two. Moreover the new-comer, having arranged some
blankets in a tub to her satisfaction, calmly tucked up her skirts
in a professional manner and got bare-foot into the tub beside
them. Then it dawned upon Ralph, who was not very instructed on
matters of household economy, that he had chanced upon a Galloway
blanket-washing; and that, like the gentleman who spied upon
Musidora's toilet, of whom he had read in Mr. James Thomson's
Seasons, he might possibly see more than he had come out to see.

Yet it was impossible to rise composedly and take his way
manseward. Ralph wished now that he had gone at the first alarm.
It had become so much more difficult now, as indeed it always does
in such cases. Moreover, he was certain that these two vagabonds
of curs would return. And they would be sure to find him out. Dogs
were unnecessary and inconvenient beasts, always sniffing and
nosing about. He decided to wait. The new-comer of the kilts was
after all no Naiad or Hebe. Her outlines did not resemble to any
marked degree the plates in his excellent classical dictionary.
She was not short in stature, but so strong and of a complexion so
ruddily beaming above the reaming white which filled the blanket
tub, that her mirthful face shone like the sun through an evening
mist.

But Ralph did not notice that, in so far as she could, she had
relieved the taller maiden of the heavier share of the work; and
that her laugh was hung on a hair trigger, to go off at every jest
and fancy of Winsome Charteris. All this is to introduce Miss Meg
Kissock, chief and favoured maidservant at the Dullarg farm, and
devoted worshipper of Winsome, the young mistress thereof. Meg
indeed, would have thanked no one for an introduction, being at
all times well able (and willing) to introduce herself.

It had been a shock to Ralph Peden when Meg Kissock walked up from
the lane-side barefoot, and when she cleared the decks for the
blanket tramping. But he had seen something like it before on the
banks of the water of Leith, then running clear and limpid over
its pebbles, save for a flour-mill or two on the lower reaches.
But it was altogether another thing when, plain as print, he saw
his first goddess of the shining water-pails sit calmly down on
the great granite boulder in the shadow of the bridge, and take
one small foot in her hand with the evident intention of removing
her foot-gear and occupying the second tub.

The hot blood surged in responsive shame to Ralph Peden's cheeks
and temples. He started up. Meg Kissock was tramping the blankets
rhythmically, holding her green kirtle well up with both hands,
and singing with all her might. The goddess of the shining pails
was also happily unconscious, with her face to the running water.
Ralph bent low and hastened through a gap in the fence towards the
shade of the elder bushes on the slope. He did not run--he has
never acknowledged that; but he certainly came almost
indistinguishably near it. As soon, however, as he was really out
of sight, he actually did take to his heels and run in the
direction of the manse, disconcerted and demoralized.

The dogs completed his discomfiture, for they caught sight of his
flying figure and gave chase--contenting themselves, however, with
pausing on the hillside where Ralph had been lying, with indignant
barkings and militant tails high crested in air.

Winsome Charteris went up to the broom bushes which fringed the
slope to find out what was the matter with Tyke and Roger. When
she got there, a slim black figure was just vanishing round the
white bend of the Far Away Turn. Winsome whistled low this time,
and without putting even one finger into her mouth.





CHAPTER II.

THE MOTHER OF KING LEMUEL.


It was not till Ralph Peden had returned to the study of the manse
of the Marrow kirk of Dullarg, and the colour induced by exercise
had had time to die out of his naturally pale cheeks, that he
remembered that he had left his Hebrew Bible and Lexicon, as well
as a half-written exegesis on an important subject, underneath the
fatal whin bush above the bridge over the Grannoch water. He would
have been glad to rise and seek it immediately--a task which,
indeed, no longer presented itself in such terrible colours to
him. He found himself even anxious to go. It would be a serious
thing were he to lose his father's Lexicon and Mr. Welsh's Hebrew
Bible. Moreover, he could not bear the thought of leaving the
sheets of his exposition of the last chapter of Proverbs to be the
sport of the gamesome Galloway winds--or, worse thought, the
laughing-stock of gamesome young women who whistled with two
fingers in their mouths.

Yet the picture of the maid of the loch which rose before him
struck him as no unpleasant one. He remembered for one thing how
the sun shone through the tangle of her hair. But he had quite
forgotten, on the other hand, at what part of his exegesis he had
left off. It was, however, a manifest impossibility for him to
slip out again. Besides, he was in mortal terror lest Mr. Welsh
should ask for his Hebrew Bible, or offer to revise his chapter of
the day with him. All the afternoon he was uneasy, finding no
excuse to take himself away to the loch-side in order to find his
Bible and Lexicon.

"I understand you have been studying, with a view to license, the
last chapter of the Proverbs of Solomon?" said Gilbert Welsh,
interrogatively, bending his shaggy brows and pouting his underlip
at the student.

The Marrow minister was a small man, with a body so dried and
twisted ("shauchelt" was the local word) that all the nerve stuff
of a strong nature had run up to his brain, so that when he walked
he seemed always on the point of falling forward, overbalanced by
the weight of his cliff-like brow.

"Ralph, will you ground the argument of the mother of King Lemuel
in this chapter? But perhaps you would like to refer to the
original Hebrew?" said the minister.

"Oh, no," interrupted Ralph, aghast at the latter suggestion, "I
do not need the text--thank you, sir."

But, in spite of his disclaimer, he devoutly desired to be where
the original text and his written comment upon it were at that
moment--which, indeed, was a consummation even more devoutly to be
wished than he had any suspicion of. The Marrow minister leaned
his head on his hand and looked waitingly at the young man.

Ralph recalled himself with an effort. He had to repeat to himself
that he was in the manse study, and almost to pinch his knee to
convince himself of the reality of his experiences. But this was
not necessary a second time, for, as he sat hastily down on one of
Allen Welsh's hard-wood chairs, a prickle from the gorse bush
which he had brought back with him from Loch Grannoch side was
argument sharp enough to convince Bishop Berkeley.

"Compose yourself to answer my question," said the minister, with
some slight severity. Ralph wondered silently if even a minister
of the Marrow kirk in good standing, could compose himself on one
whin prickle for certain, and the probability of several others
developing themselves at various angles hereafter.

Ralph "grounded" himself as best as he could, explaining the views
of the mother of King Lemuel as to the woman of virtue and
faithfulness. He seemed to himself to have a fluency and a fervour
in exposition to which he had been a stranger. He began to have
new views about the necessity for the creation of Eve. Woman might
possibly, after all, be less purely gratuitous than he had
supposed.

"The woman who is above rubies," said he, "is one who rises early
to care for the house, who oversees the handmaids as they cleanse
the household stuffs--in a" (he just saved himself from saying "in
a black pot")--"in a fitting vessel by the rivers of water."

"Well put and correctly mandated," said Mr. Welsh, very much
pleased. There was unction about this young man. Though a bachelor
by profession, he loved to hear the praises of good women; for he
had once known one.

"She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and--"

Here Ralph paused, biting his tongue to keep from describing the
picture which rose before him.

"And what," said the minister, tentatively, leaning forward to
look into the open face of the young man, "what is the distinction
or badge of true beauty and favour of countenance, as so well
expressed by the mother of King Lemuel?"

"A LILAC SUNBONNET!" said Ralph Peden, student in divinity.





CHAPTER III.

A TREASURE-TROVE.


Winsome CHARTERIS was a self-possessed maid, but undeniably her
heart beat faster when she found on the brae face, beneath the
bush of broom, two books the like of which she had never seen
before, as well as an open notebook with writing upon it in the
neatest and delicatest of hands. First, as became a prudent woman
of experience, she went up to the top of the hill to assure
herself that the owner of this strange treasure was not about to
return. Then she carefully let down her high-kilted print dress
till only her white feet "like little mice" stole in and out. It
did not strike her that this sacrifice to the conventions was just
a trifle belated.

As she returned she said "Shoo!" at every tangled bush, and
flapped her apron as if to scare whatever curious wild fowl might
have left behind it in its nest under the broom such curious nest-
eggs as two great books full of strange, bewitched-looking
printing, and a note-book of curious and interesting writings.
Then, with a half sigh of disappointment, Winsome Charteris sat
herself down to look into this matter. Meg Kissock from the bridge
end showed signs of coming up to see what she was about; but
Winsome imperiously checked the movement.

"Bide where you are, Meg; I'll be down with you presently."

She turned over the great Hebrew Bible reverently. "A. Welsh" was
written on the fly-leaf. She had a strange idea that she had seen
it before. It seemed somehow thrillingly familiar.

"That's the minister's Hebrew Bible book, no doubt," she said.
"For that's the same kind of printing as between the double verses
of the hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm in my grandfather's big
Bible," she continued, sapiently shaking her head till the crispy
ringlets tumbled about her eyes, and she had impatiently to toss
them aside.

She laid the Bible down and peeped into the other strange-looking
book. There were single words here of the same kind as in the
other, but the most part was in ordinary type, though in a
language of which she could make nothing. The note-book was a
resource. It was at least readable, and Winsome Charteris began
expectantly to turn it over. But something stirred reprovingly in
her heart. It seemed as if she were listening to a conversation
not meant for her. So she kept her finger on the leaf, but did not
turn it.

"No," she said, "I will not read it. It is not meant for me."
Then, after a pause, "At least I will only read this page which is
open, and then look at the beginning to see whose it is; for, you
know, I may need to send it back to him." The back she had seen
vanish round the Far Away Turn demanded the masculine pronoun.

She lifted the book and read:

"Alas!" (so ran the writing, fluent and clear, small as printer's
type, Ralph Peden's beautiful Hellenic script), "alas, that the
good qualities of the housewives of Solomon's days are out of date
and forgotten in these degenerate times! Women, especially the
younger of them, are become gadabouts, chatterers in the public
ways, idle, adorners of their vain selves, pamperers of their
frail tabernacles--"

Winsome threw down the book and almost trod upon it as upon a
snake.

"'Tis some city fop," she said, stamping her foot, "who is tired
of the idle town dames. I wonder if he has ever seen the sun rise
or done a day's work in his life? If only I had the wretch! But I
will read no more!"

In token of the sincerity of the last assertion, she picked up the
note-book again. There was little more to read. It was at this
point that the humble-bee had startled the writer.

But underneath there were woids faintly scrawled in pencil: "Must
concentrate attention"--"The proper study of mankind is"--this
last written twice, as if the writer were practising copy-lines
absently. Then at the very bottom was written, so faintly that
hardly any eyes but Winsome's could have read the words:

"Of all colours I do love the lilac. I wonder all maids do not
wear gear of that hue!"

"Oh!" said Winsome Charteris quickly.

Then she gathered up the books very gently, and taking a kerchief
from her neck, she folded the two great books within it, fastening
them with a cunning knot. She was carrying them slowly up towards
the farm town of Craig Ronald in her bare arms when Ralph Peden
sat answering his catechism in the study at the manse. She entered
the dreaming courtyard, and walked sedately across its silent sun-
flooded spaces without a sound. She passed the door of the cool
parlour where her grandfather and grandmother sat, the latter with
her hands folded and her great tortoiseshell spectacles on her
nose, taking her afternoon nap. A volume of Waverley lay beside
her. Into her own white little room Winsome went, and laid the
bundle of books in the bottom of the wall-press, which was lined
with sheets of the Cairn Edward Miscellany. She looked at it some
time before she shut the door.

"His name is Ralph," she said. "I wonder how old he is--I shall
know tomorrow, because he will come back; but--I would like to
know tonight."

She sighed a little--so light a breath that it was only the dream
of a sigh. Then she looked at the lilac sunbonnet, as if it ought
to have known.

"At any rate he has very good taste," she said.

But the lilac sunbonnet said never a word.





CHAPTER IV.

A CAVALIER PURITAN.


The farm town of Craig Ronald drowsed in the quiet of noon. In the
open court the sunshine triumphed, and only the purple-grey marsh
mallows along the side of the house under the windows gave any
sign of life. In them the bees had begun to hum at earliest dawn,
an hour and a half before the sun looked over the crest of Ben
Gairn. They were humming busily still. In all the chambers of the
house there was the same reposeful stillness. Through them Winsome
Charteris moved with free, light step. She glanced in to see that
her grandfather and grandmother were wanting for nothing in their
cool and wide sitting-room, where the brown mahogany-cased eight-
day clock kept up an unequal ticking, like a man walking upon two
wooden legs of which one is shorter than the other.

It said something for Winsome Charteris and her high-hearted
courage, that what she was accustomed to see in that sitting-room
had no effect upon her spirits. It was a pleasant room enough,
with two windows looking to the south--little round-budded, pale-
petalled monthly roses nodding and peeping within the opened
window-frames. Sweet it was with a great peace, every chair
covered with old sprigged chintz, flowers of the wood and heather
from the hill set in china vases about it. The room where the old
folk dwelt at Craig Ronald was fresh within as is the dew on
sweetbrier. Fresh, too, was the apparel of her grandmother, the
flush of youth yet on her delicate cheek, though the Psalmist's
limit had long been passed for her.

As Winsome looked within,

"Are ye not sleeping, grandmother?" she said.

The old lady looked up with a resentful air.

"Sleepin'! The lassie's gane gyte! [out of her senses]. What for
wad I be sleepin' in the afternune? An' me wi' the care o' yer
gran'faither--sic a handling, him nae better nor a bairn, an' you
a bit feckless hempie wi' yer hair fleeing like the tail o' a twa-
year-auld cowt! [colt]. Sleepin' indeed! Na, sleepin's nane for
me!"

The young girl came up and put her arms about her grandmother.

"That's rale unceevil o' ye, noo, Granny Whitemutch!" she said,
speaking in the coaxing tones to which the Scots' language lends
itself so easily, "an' it's just because I hae been sae lang at
the blanket-washin', seein' till that hizzy Meg. An' ken ye what I
saw!-ane o' the black dragoons in full retreat, grannie; but he
left his camp equipage ahint him, as the sergeant said when--Ye
ken the story, grannie. Ye maun hae been terrible bonny in thae
days!"

"'Deed I'm nane sae unbonny yet, for a' yer helicat
flichtmafleathers, sprigget goons, an' laylac bonnets," said the
old lady, shaking her head till the white silk top-knots trembled.
"No, nor I'm nane sae auld nayther. The gudeman in the corner
there, he's auld and dune gin'ye like, but no me--no me! Gin he
warna spared to me, I could even get a man yet," continued the
lively old lady, "an' whaur wad ye be then, my lass, I wad like to
ken?"

"Perhaps I could get one too, grannie," she said. And she shook
her head with an air of triumph. Winsome kissed her grandmother
gently on the brow.

"Nane o' yer Englishy tricks an' trokin's," said she, settling the
white muslin band which she wore across her brow wrinkleless and
straight, where it had been disarrayed by the onslaught of her
impulsive granddaughter.

"Aye," she went on, stretching out a hand which would have done
credit to a great dame, so white and slender was it in spite of
the hollows which ran into a triangle at the wrist, and the pale-
blue veins which the slight wrinkles have thrown into relief.

"An' I mind the time when three o' his Majesty's officers--nane
o' yer militia wi' horses that rin awa' wi' them ilka time they
gang oot till exerceese, but rale sodgers wi' sabre-tashies to
their heels and spurs like pitawtie dreels. Aye, sirs, but that
was before I married an elder in the Kirk o' the Marrow. I wasna
twenty-three when I had dune wi' the gawds an' vanities o' this
wicked world."

"I saw a minister lad the day--a stranger," said Winsome, very
quietly.

"Sirce me," returned her grandmother briskly; "kenned I e'er the
like o' ye, Winifred Chayrteris, for licht-heedit-ness an' lack o'
a' common sense! Saw a minister an' ne'er thocht, belike, o'
sayin' cheep ony mair nor if he had been a wutterick [weasel]. An'
what like was he, na? Was he young, or auld--or no sae verra auld,
like mysel'? Did he look like an Establisher by the consequence o'
the body, or--"

"But, grannie dear, how is it possible that I should ken, when all
that I saw of him was but his coat-tails? It was him that was
running away."

"My certes," said grannie, "but the times are changed since my
day! When I was as young as ye are the day it wasna sodger or
minister ayther that wad hae run frae the sicht o' me. But a
minister, and a fine, young-looking man, I think ye said,"
continued Mistress Walter Skirving anxiously.

"Indeed, grandmother, I said nothing--" began Winsome.

"Haud yer tongue, Deil's i' the lassie, he'll be comin' here.
Maybes he's comin' up the loan this verra meenit. Get me my best
kep [cap], the French yin o' Flanders lawn trimmed wi' Valenceenes
lace that Captain Wildfeather, of his Majesty's--But na, I'll no
think o' thae times, I canna bear to think o' them wi' ony
complaisance ava. But bring me my kep--haste ye fast, lassie!"

Obediently Winsome went to her grandmother's bedroom and drew from
under the bed the "mutch" box lined with pale green paper,
patterned with faded pink roses. She did not smile when she drew
it out. She was accustomed to her grandmother's ways. She too
often felt the cavalier looking out from under her Puritan
teaching; for the wild strain of the Gordon blood held true to its
kind, and Winsome's grandmother had been a Gordon at Lochenkit,
whose father had ridden with Kenmure in the great rebellion.

When she brought the white goffered mutch with its plaits and
puckers, granny tried it on in various ways, Winsome meanwhile
holding a small mirror before her.

"As I was sayin', I renounced thinkin' aboot the vanities o' youth
langsyne. Aye, it'll be forty years sin'--for ye maun mind that I
was marriet whan but a lassie. Aye me, it's forty-five years since
Ailie Gordon, as I was then, wed wi' Walter Skirving o' Craig
Ronald (noo o' his ain chammer neuk, puir man, for he'll never
leave it mair)," added she with a brisk kind of acknowledgment
towards the chair of the semi-paralytic in the corner.

There silent and unregarding Walter Skirving sat--a man still
splendid in frame and build, erect in his chair, a shawl over his
knees even in this day of fervent heat, looking out dumbly on the
drowsing, humming world of broad, shadowless noonshine, and often
also on the equable silences of the night.

"No that I regret it the day, when he is but the name o' the man
he yince was. For fifty years since there was nae lad like Walter
Skirving cam into Dumfries High Street frae Stewartry or frae
Shire. No a fit in buckled shune sae licht as his, his weel-shapit
leg covered wi' the bonny 'rig-an'-fur' stockin' that I knitted
mysel' frae the cast on o' the ower-fauld [over-fold] to the bonny
white forefit that sets aff the blue sae weel. Walter Skirving
could button his knee-breeks withoot bendin' his back--that nane
could do but the king's son himsel'; an' sic a dancer as he was
afore guid an' godly Maister Cauldsowans took hand o' him at the
tent, wi' preachin' a sermon on booin' the knee to Baal. Aye, aye,
its a' awa'--an' its mony the year I thocht on it, let alane
thocht on wantin' back thae days o' vanity an' the pride o' sinfu'
youth!"

"Tell me about the officer men, granny," said Winsome.

"'Deed wull I no. It wad be mair tellin' ye gin ye were learnin'
yer Caritches" [Westminster Catechism].

"But, grandmammy dear, I thought that you said that the officer
men ran away from you--"

"Hear till her! Rin frae me? Certes, ye're no blate. They cam'
frae far an' near to get a word wi' me. Na, there was nae rinnin'
frae a bonny lass in thae days. Weel, there was three o' them; an'
they cam' ower the hill to see the lasses, graund in their reed
breeks slashed wi' yellow. An' what for no, they war his Majesty's
troopers; an' though nae doot they had been on the wrang side o'
the dyke, they were braw chiels for a' that!"

"An' they cam' to see you, granny?" asked Winsome, who approved of
the subject.

"What else--but they got an unco begunk [cheat]. Ye see, my
faither had bocht an awfu' thrawn young bull at the Dumfries fair,
an' he had been gaun gilravagin' aboot; an' whaur should the
contrary beast betak' himsel' to but into the Roman camp on Craig
Ronald bank, where the big ditch used to be? There we heard him
routin' for three days till the cotmen fand him i' the hinderend,
an' poo'ed him oot wi' cart-rapes. But when he got oot--certes,
but he was a wild beast! He got at Jock Hinderlands afore he could
climb up a tree; an', fegs, he gaed up a tree withoot clim'in',
I'se warrant, an' there he hung, hanket by the waistband o' his
breeks, baa-haain' for his minnie to come and lift him doon, an'
him as muckle a clampersome [awkward] hobbledehoy as ever ye saw!

"Then what did Carlaverock Jock do but set his heid to a yett
[gate] and ding it in flinders; fair fire-wood he made o't; an'
sae, rampagin' into the meadow across whilk," continued the old
lady, with a rising delight in her eye, "the three cavalry men
were comin' to see me, wi' the spurs on them jangling clear. Reed
breeks did na suit Jock's taste at the best o' times, and he had
no been brocht up to countenance yellow facin's. So the three braw
King George's sodgers that had dune sic graund things at Waterloo
took the quickest road through the meadow. Captain St. Clair, he
trippit on his sword, an' was understood to cry oot that he had
never eaten beef in his life. Ensign Withershins threw his shako
ower his shoother and jumpit intil the water, whaur he expressed
his opinion o' Carlaverock Jock stan'in' up to his neck in Luckie
Mowatt's pool--the words I dinna juist call to mind at this
present time, which, indeed, is maybe as weel; but it was
Lieutenant Lichtbody, o' his Majesty's Heavy Dragoons, that cam'
aff at the waurst. He made for the stane dyke, the sven-fite march
dyke that rins up the hill, ye ken. Weel, he made as if he wad
mak' ower it, but Boreland'a big Heelant bull had heard the
routin' o' his friend Carlaverock Jock, an' was there wi' his
horns spread like a man keppin' yowes [catching sheep]. Aye, my
certes!" here the old lady paused, overcome by the humour of her
recollections, laughing in her glee a delightfully catching and
mellow laugh, in which Winsome joined.

"Sae there was my braw beau, Lieutenant Lichtbody, sittin' on his
hunkers on the dyke tap girnin' at Carlaverock Jock an' the
Boreland Hielantman on baith sides o' him, an' tryin' tae hit them
ower the nose wi' the scabbard o' his sword, for the whinger
itsel' had drappit oot in what ye micht ca' the forced retreat. It
was bonny, bonny to see; an' whan the three cam' up the loanin'
the neist day, 'Sirs,' I said, 'I'm thinkin' ye had better be
gaun. I saw Carlaverock Jock the noo, fair tearin' up the
greensward. It wudna be bonny gin his Majesty's officers had twice
to mak' sae rapid a march to the rear--an' you, Lieutenant
Lichtbody, canna hae a'thegither gotten the better o' yer lang
sederunt on the tap o' the hill dyke. It's a bonny view that ye
had. It was a peety that ye had forgotten yer perspective
glasses.'

"And wad ye believe it, lassie, the threesome turned on the braid
o'their fit an' marched doon the road withoot as muckle as Fair-
guid-e'en or Fair-guid-day!"

"And what said ye, grannie dear?" said Winsome, who sat on a low
seat looking up at her granny.

"O lassie, I juist set my braid hat ower my lug wi' the bonny
white cockade intil't an' gied them 'The Wee, Wee German Lairdie'
as they gaed doon the road, an' syne on the back o't:

    "'Awa, Whigs, awa'!
    Ye're but a pack----'"

But the great plaid-swathed figure of Winsome's grandfather turned
at the words of the long-forgotten song as though waking from a
deep sleep. A slumberous fire gleamed momentarily in his eye.

"Woman," he said, "hold your peace; let not these words be heard
in the house of Walter Skirving!"

Having thus delivered himself, the fire faded out of his eyes dead
as black ashes; he turned to the window, and lost himself again in
meditation, looking with steady eyes across the ocean of sunshine
which flooded the valley beneath.

His wife gave him no answer. She seemed scarce to have heard the
interruption. But Winsome went across and pulled the heavy plaid
gently off her grandfather's shoulder. Then she stood quietly by
him with one hand upon his head and with the other she gently
stroked his brow. A milder light grew in his dull eye, and he put
up his hand uncertainly as if to take hers.

"But what for should I be takin' delicht in speakin' o' thae auld
unsanctified regardless days," said her grandmother, "that 'tis
mony a year since I hae ta'en ony pleesure in thinkin' on? Gae
wa', ye hempie that ye are!" she cried, turning with a sudden and
uncalled-for sparkle of temper on her granddaughter; "There's nae
time an' little inclination in this hoose for yer flichty
conversation. I wonder muckle that yer thouchts are sae set on the
vanities o' young men. And such are all that delight in them." She
went on somewhat irrelevantly, "Did not godly Maister Cauldsowans
redd up [settle] the doom o' such--'all desirable young men riding
upon horses--'"

"An' I'll gae redd up the dairy, an' kirn the butter, grannie!"
said Winsome Charteris, breaking in on the flow of her
grandmother's reproaches.





CHAPTER V.

A LESSON IN BOTANY.


No lassie in all the hill country went forth more heart-whole
into the June morning than Winsome Charteris. She was not, indeed,
wholly a girl of the south uplands. Her grandmother was never done
reminding her of her "Englishy" ways, which, according to that
authority, she had contracted during those early years she had
spent in Cumberland. From thence she had been brought to the farm
town of Craig Ronald, soon after the death of her only uncle, Adam
Skirving--whose death, coming after the loss of her own mother,
had taken such an effect upon her grandfather that for years he
had seldom spoken, and now took little interest in the ongoings of
the farm.

Walter Skirving was one of a class far commoner in Galloway sixty
years ago than now. He was a "bonnet laird" of the best type, and
his farm, which included all kinds of soil--arable and pasture,
meadow and moor, hill pasture and wood--was of the value of about
L300 a year, a sum sufficient in those days to make him a man of
substance and consideration in the country.

He had been all his life, except for a single year in his youth
when he broke bounds, a Marrow man of the strictest type; and it
had been the wonder and puzzle of his life (to others, not to
himself) how he came to make up to Ailie Gordon, the daughter of
the old moss-trooping Lochenkit Gordons, that had ridden with the
laird of Redgauntlet in the killing time, and more recently had
been out with Maxwell of Nithsdale, and Gordon of Kenmure, to
strike a blow for the "King-over-the-Water." And to this very day,
though touched with a stroke which prevented her from moving far
out of her chair, Ailie Skirving showed the good blood and high-
hearted lightsomeness that had won the young laird of Craig Ronald
upon the Loch Grannoch side nearly fifty years before.

It was far more of a wonder how Ailie Gordon came to take Walter
Skirving. It may be that she felt in her heart the accent of a
true man in the unbending, nonjuring elder of the Marrow kirk. Two
great heart-breaks had crossed their lives: the shadow of the life
story of Winsome's mother, that earlier Winsome whose name had not
been heard for twenty years in the house of Craig Ronald; and the
more recent death of Adam, the strong, silent, chivalrous-natured
son who had sixteen years ago been killed, falling from his horse
as he rode home alone one winter's night from Dumfries.

It was a natural thing to be in love with Winsome Charteris. It
seemed natural to Winsome herself. Ever since she was a little
lass running to school in Keswick, with a touse of lint-white
locks blowing out in the gusts that came swirling off Skiddaw,
Winsome had always been conscious of a train of admirers. The boys
liked to carry her books, and were not so ashamed to walk home
with her, as even at six years of age young Cumbrians are wont to
be in the company of maids. Since she came to Galloway, and opened
out with each succeeding year, like the bud of a moss rose growing
in a moist place, Winsome had thought no more of masculine
admiration than of the dull cattle that "goved" [stared stupidly]
upon her as she picked her deft way among the stalls in the byre.
In all Craig Ronald there was nothing between the hill and the
best room that did not bear the mark of Winsome's method and
administrative capacity. In perfect dependence upon Winsome, her
granny had gradually abandoned all the management of the house to
her, so that at twenty that young woman was a veritable Napoleon
of finance and capacity. Only old Richard Clelland of the
Boreland, grave and wise pillar of the kirk by law established,
still transacted her market business and banked her siller--being,
as he often said, proud to act as "doer" for so fair a principal.
So it happened that all the reins of government about this tiny
lairdship of one farm were in the strong and capable hands of a
girl of twenty.

And Meg Kissock was her true admirer and faithful slave--Winsome's
heavy hand, too, upon occasion; for all the men on the farm stood
in awe of Meg's prowess, and very especially of Meg's tongue. So
also the work fell mostly upon these two, and in less measure upon
a sister of Meg's, Jess Kissock, lately returned from England, a
young lady whom we have already met.

During the night and morning Winsome had studied with some
attention the Hebrew Bible, in which the name Allan Welsh
appeared, as well as the Latin Luther Commentary, and the Hebrew
Lexicon, on the first page of which the name of Ralph Peden was
written in the same neat print hand as in the note-book.

This was the second day of the blanket-washing, and Winsome,
having in her mind a presentiment that the proprietor of these
learned quartos would appear to claim his own, carried them down
to the bridge, where Meg and her sister were already deep in the
mysteries of frothing tubs and boiling pots. Winsome from the
broomy ridge could hear the shrill "giff-gaff" [give and take] of
their colloquy. She sat down under Ralph's very broom bush, and
absently turned over the leaves of the note-book, catching
sentences here and there.

"I wonder how old he is?" she said, meditatively; "his coat-tails
looked old, but the legs went too lively for an old man; besides,
he likes maids to be dressed in lilac--" She paused still more
thoughtfully. "Well, we shall see." She bent over and pulled the
milky-stalked, white-seeded head of a dandelion. Taking it between
the finger and thumb of her left hand she looked critically at it
as though it were a glass of wine. "He is tall, and he is fair,
and his age is--"

Here she pouted her pretty lips and blew.

"One--ha, ha!--he was an active infant when he ran from the
blanket-tramping--two, three, four--"

Some tiny feather-headed spikelets disengaged themselves
unwillingly from the round and venerable downpolled dandelion.
They floated lazily up between the tassels of the broom upon the
light breeze.

"Five, six, seven, eight--faith, he was a clean-heeled laddie yon.
Ye couldna see his legs or coat-tails for stour as he gaed roon'
the Far Away Turn."

Winsome was revelling in her broad Scots. She had learned it from
her grandmother.

"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--I'll no
can set the dogs on him then--sixteen, seventeen, eighteen--dear
me, this is becoming interesting."

The plumules were blowing off freely now, like snow from the eaves
on a windy day in winter.

"Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one--I must reverence my elders. If I
don't blow stronger he'll turn out to be fifty--twenty-three,
twenty-f--"

A shadow fell across the daintily-held dandelion and lay a blue
patch on the grass. Only one pale grey star stood erect on the
stem, the vacant green sheathing of the calyx turning suddenly
down.

"TWENTY-FOUR!--" said Ralph Peden quietly, standing with his hat
in his hand and an eager flush on his cheek. The last plumule
floated away.

Winsome Charteris had risen instinctively, and stood looking with
crimson cheeks and quicker-coming breath at this young man who
came upon her in the nick of time.

He was startled and a little indignant. So they stood facing one
another while one might count a score--silent and drinking each
the other in, with that flashing transference of electric sympathy
possible only to the young and the innocent.

It was the young man who spoke first. Winsome was a little
indignant that he should dare to come upon her while so engaged.
Not, of course, that she cared for a moment what he thought of
her, but he ought to have known better than to have stolen upon
her while she was behaving in such a ridiculous, childish way. It
showed what he was capable of.

"My name is Ralph Peden," he said humbly. "I came from Edinburgh
the day before yesterday. I am staying with Mr. Welsh at the
manse."

Winsome Charteris glanced down at the books and blushed still more
deeply. The Hebrew Bible and Lexicon lay harmlessly enough on the
grass, and the Luther was swinging in a frivolous and
untheological way on the strong, bent twigs of broom. But where
was the note-book? Like a surge of Solway tide the remembrance
came over her that, when she had plucked the dandelion for her
soothsaying, she had thrust it carelessly into the bosom of her
lilac-sprigged gown. Indeed, a corner of it peeped out at this
moment. Had he seen it?--monstrous thought! She knew young men and
the interpretations that they put upon nothings! This, in spite of
his solemn looks and mantling bashfulness, was a young man.

"Then I suppose these are yours," said Winsome, turning sideways
towards the indicated articles so as to conceal the note-book. The
young man removed his eyes momentarily from her face and looked in
the direction of the books. He seemed to have entirely forgotten
what it was that had brought him to Loch Grannoch bridge so early
this June morning. Winsome took advantage of his glance to feel
that her sunbonnet sat straight, and as her hand was on its way to
her clustering curls she took this opportunity of thrusting
Ralph's note-book into more complete concealment. Then her hands
went up to her head only to discover that her sunbonnet had
slipped backward, and was now hanging down her back by the
strings.

Ralph Peden looked up at her, apparently entirely satisfied. What
was a note-book to him now? He saw the sunbonnet resting upon the
wavy distraction of the pale gold hair. He had a luxurious eye for
colour. That lilac and gold went well together, was his thought.

Trammelled by the fallen head-gear, Winsome threw her head back,
shaking out her tresses in a way that Ralph Peden never forgot.
Then she caught at the strings of the errant bonnet.

"Oh, let it alone!" he suddenly exclaimed.

"Sir?" said Winsome Charteris--interrogatively, not imperatively.
Ralph Peden, who had taken a step forward in the instancy of his
appeal, came to himself again in a moment.

"I beg your pardon," he said very humbly, "I had no right--"

He paused, uncertain what to say.

Winsome Charteris looked up quickly, saw the simplicity of the
young man, in one full eye-blink read his heart, then dropped her
eyes again and said:

"But I thought you liked lilac sunbonnets!"

Ralph Peden had now his turn to blush. Hardly in the secret of his
own heart had he said this thing. Only to Mr. Welsh had his
forgetful tongue uttered the word that was in his mind, and which
had covered since yesterday morn all the precepts of that most
superfluous wise woman, the mother of King Lemuel.

"Are you a witch?" asked Ralph, blundering as an honest and
bashful man may in times of distress into the boldest speech.

"You want to go up and see my grandmother, do you not?" said
Winsome, gravely, for such conversation was not to be continued on
any conditions.

"Yes," said the young man, perjuring himself with a readiness and
facility most unbecoming in a student desiring letters of
probation from the Protesting and Covenant-keeping Kirk of the
Marrow.

Ralph Peden lightly picked up the books, which, as Winsome knew,
were some considerable weight to carry.

"Do you find them quite safe?" she asked.

"There was a heavy dew last night," he answered, "but in spite of
it they seem quite dry.

"We often notice the same thing on Loch Grannoch side," said
Winsome.

"I thought--that is, I was under the impression--that I had left a
small book with some manuscript notes!" said the young man,
tentatively.

"It may have dropped among the broom," replied the simple maid.

Whereupon the two set to seeking, both bareheaded, brown cropped
head and golden wilderness of tresses not far from one another,
while the "book of manuscript notes" rose and fell to the
quickened heart-beating of that wicked and deceitful girl, Winsome
Charteris.





CHAPTER VI.

CURLED EYELASHES.


Now Meg Kissock could stand a great deal, and she would put up
with a great deal to pleasure her mistress; but half an hour of
loneliness down by the washing was overly much for her, and the
struggle between loyalty and curiosity ended, after the manner of
her sex, in the victory of the latter.

As Ralph and Winsome continued to seek, they came time and again
close together and the propinquity of flushed cheek and mazy
ringlet stirred something in the lad's heart which had never been
touched by the Mistresses Thriepneuk, who lived where the new
houses of the Plainstones look over the level meadows of the
Borough Muir. His father had often said within himself, as he
walked the Edinburgh streets to visit some sick kirk member, as he
had written to his friend Adam Welsh, "Has the lad a heart?" Had
he seen him on that broomy knowe over the Grannoch water, he had
not doubted, though he might well have been fearful enough of that
heart's too sudden awakening.

Never before had the youth come within that delicate AURA of charm
which radiates from the bursting bud of the finest womanhood.
Ralph Peden had kept his affections ascetically virgin. His
nature's finest juices had gone to feed the brain, yet all the
time his heart had waited expectant of the revealing of a mystery.
Winsome Charteris had come so suddenly into his life that the
universe seemed newborn in a day. He sprang at once from the
thought of woman as only an unexplained part of the creation, to
the conception of her (meaning thereby Winsome Charteris) as an
angel who had not lost her first estate.

It was a strange thing for Ralph Peden, as indeed it is to every
true man, to come for the first time within the scope of the
unconscious charms of a good girl. There is, indeed, no better
solvent of a cold nature, no better antidote to a narrow
education, no better bulwark of defence against frittering away
the strength and solemnity of first love, than a sudden, strong
plunge into its deep waters.

Like timid bathers, who run a little way into the tide and then
run out again with ankles wet, fearful of the first chill, many
men accustom themselves to love by degrees. So they never taste
the sweetness and strength of it as did Ralph Peden in these days,
when, never having looked upon a maid with the level summer
lightning of mutual interest flashing in his eyes, he plunged into
love's fathomless mysteries as one may dive upon a still day from
some craggy platform among the westernmost isles into Atlantic
depths.

Winsome's light summer dress touched his hand and thrilled the lad
to his remotest nerve centres. He stood light-headed, taking in as
only they twain looked over the loch with far-away eyes, that
subtle fragrance, delicate and free, which like a garment clothed
the maid of the Grannoch lochside.

"The water's on the boil," cried Meg Kissock, setting her ruddy
shock of hair and blooming, amplified, buxom form above the knoll,
wringing at the same time the suds from her hands, "an' I canna
lift it aff mysel'."

Her mistress looked at her with a sudden suspicion. Since when had
Meg grown so feeble?

"We had better go down," she said simply, turning to Ralph, who
would have cheerfully assented had she suggested that they
should together walk into the loch among the lily beds. It was the
"we" that overcame him. His father had used the pronoun in quite a
different sense. "WE will take the twenty-ninth chapter of second
Chronicles this morning, Ralph--what do WE understand by this
peculiar use of VAV CONVERSIVE?"

But it was quite another thing when Winsome Charteris said simply,
as though he had been her brother:

"We had better go down!"

So they went down, taking the little stile at which Winsome had
meditated over the remarks of Ralph Peden concerning the creation
of Eve upon their way. Meg Kissock led the van, and took the dyke
vigorously without troubling the steps, her kirtle fitting her for
such exercises. Winsome came next, and Ralph stood aside to let
her pass. She sprang up the low steps light as a feather, rested
her fingertips for an appreciable fraction of a second on the hand
which he instinctively held out, and was over before he realized
that anything had happened. Yet it seemed that in that contact,
light as a rose-leaf blown by the winds of late July against his
cheek, his past life had been shorn clean away from all the future
as with a sharp sword.

Ralph Peden had dutifully kissed his cousins Jemima, Kezia, and
Kerenhappuch; but, on the whole, he had felt more pleasure when he
had partaken of the excellent bannocks prepared for him by the
fair hands of Kerenhappuch herself. But this was wholly a new
thing. His breath came suddenly short. He breathed rapidly as
though to give his lungs more air. The atmosphere seemed to have
grown rarer and colder. Indeed, it was a different world, and the
blanket-washing itself was transferred to some deliciously homely
outlying annex of paradise.

Yet it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should
be helping this girl, and he went forward with the greatest
assurance to lift the black pot off the fire for her. The keen,
acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam
of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye,
rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong.
Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever struggled
with anything more formidable than the folio hide-hound Calvins
and Turretins on his father's lower shelf in James's Court, he had
been no mean antagonist.

But, though he managed with a great effort to lift the black pot
off its gypsy tripod, he would have let the boiling contents swing
dangerously against his legs had not Winsome caught sharply at his
other hand and leaned over, so balancing the weight of the boiling
water. So they walked down the path to where the tubs stood under
the shade of the great ash-trees, with their sky-tossing, dry-
rustling leaves. There Ralph set his burden down. Meg Kissock had
been watching him keenly. She saw that he had severely burned his
hand, and also that he said nothing whatever about it. He was a
man. This gained for the young man Meg's hearty approval almost as
much as his bashfulness and native good looks. What Meg Kissock
did not know was that Ralph was altogether unconscious of the
wound in his hand. It was a deeper wound which was at that time
monopolising his thoughts. But this little incident was more than
a thousand certificates in the eyes of Meg Kissock, and Meg's
friendship was decidedly worth cultivating. Even for its own sake
she did not give it lightly.

Before Winsome Charteris could release her hand, Ralph turned and
said:

"Do you know you have not yet told me your name?"

Winsome did know it very well, but she only said, "My name is
Winsome Charteris, and this is Meg Kissock."

"Winsome Charteris, Winsome Charteris," said Ralph's heart over
and over again, and he had not even the grace to say "Thank you";
but Meg stepped up to shake him by the hand.

"I'm braw an' prood to ken ye, sir," said Meg. "That muckle sumph
[stupid], Saunders Mowdiewort, telled me a' aboot ye comin' an'
the terrible store o' lear [learning] ye hae. He's the minister's
man, ye ken, an' howks the graves ower by at the parish kirk-yard,
for the auld betheral there winna gang ablow three fit deep, and
them that haes ill-tongued wives to haud doon disna want ony
mistake--"

"Meg," said her mistress, "do not forget yourself."

"Deil a fear," said Meg; "it was auld Sim o' Glower-ower-'em, the
wizened auld hurcheon [hedgehog], that set a big thruch stane ower
his first wife; and when he buried his second in the neist grave,
he just turned the broad flat stone. 'Guid be thankit!' he says,
'I had the forethocth to order a stane heavy eneuch to hand them
baith doon!'"

"Get to the washing, Meg," said Winsome.

"Fegs!" returned Meg, "ye waur in nae great hurry yersel' doon aff
the broomy knowe! What's a' the steer sae sudden like?"

Winsome disdained an answer, but stood to her own tub, where some
of the lighter articles--pillow-slips, and fair sheets of
"seventeen-hundred" linen were waiting her daintier hand.

As Winsome and Meg washed, Ralph Peden carried water, learning the
wondrous science of carrying two cans over a wooden hoop; and in
the frankest tutelage Winsome put her hand over his to teach him,
and the relation of master and pupil asserted its ancient danger.

It had not happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom
she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what
it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed
young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among
girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was
under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he
had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions
and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only
conscious of a great and rising delight in his heart.

As Winsome Charteris bent above the wash-tub he was at liberty to
observe how the blood mantled on the clear oval of her cheek. He
had time to note--of course entirely as a philosopher--the pale
purple shadow under the eyes, over which the dark, curling lashes
came down like the fringe of the curtain of night.

"Why--I wonder why?" he said, and stopped aghast at his utterance
aloud of his inmost thought.

"What do you wonder?" said Winsome, glancing up with a frank dewy
freshness in her eyes.

"I wonder why--I wonder that you are able to do all this work," he
said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder.

Winsome shook her head.

"Now you are trying to be like other people," she said; "I do not
think you will succeed. That was not what you were going to say.
If you are to be my friend, you must speak all the truth to me and
speak it always." A thing which, indeed, no man does to a woman.
And, besides, nobody had spoken of Ralph Peden being a friend to
her. The meaning was that their hearts had been talking while
their tongues had spoken of other things; and though there was no
thought of love in the breast of Winsome Charteris, already in the
intercourse of a single morning she had given this young Edinburgh
student of divinity a place which no other had ever attained to.
Had she had a brother, she thought, what would he not have been to
her? She felt specially fitted to have a brother. It did not occur
to her to ask whether she would have carried her brother's college
note-book, even by accident, where it could be stirred by the
beating of her heart.

"Well," Ralph said at last, "I will tell you what I was wondering.
You have asked me, and you shall know: I only wondered why your
eyelashes were so much darker than your hair."

Winsome Charteris was not in the least disturbed.

"Ministers should occupy their minds with something else," she
said, demurely. "What would Mr. Welsh say? I am sure he has never
troubled his head about such things. It is not fitting," Winsome
said severely.

"But I want to know," said this persistent young man, wondering at
himself.

"Well," said Winsome, glancing up with mischief in her eye, "I
suppose because I am a very lazy sort of person, and dark window-
blinds keep out the light."

"But why are they curled up at the end?" asked unblushingly the
author of the remarks upon Eve formerly quoted.

"It is time that you went up and saw my grandmother!" said
Winsome, with great composure.

"Juist what I was on the point o' remarkin' mysel'!" said Meg
Kissock.





CHAPTER VII.

CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE.


Winsome and Ralph walked silently and composedly side by side up
the loaning under the elder-trees, over the brook at the watering-
place to which in her hoydenish girlhood Winsome had often ridden
the horses when the ploughmen loosed Bell and Jess from the
plough. In these days she rode without a side-saddle. Sometimes
she did it yet when the spring gloamings were gathering fast, but
no one knew this except Jock Forrest, the ploughman, who never
told any more than he could help.

Silence deep as that of yesterday wrapped about the farmhouse of
Craig Ronald. The hens were all down under the lee of the great
orchard hedge, chuckling low to themselves, and nestling with
their feathers spread balloon-wise, while they flirted the hot
summer dust over them. Down where the grass was in shadow a mower
was sharpening his blade. The clear metallic sound of the "strake"
or sharpening strop, covered with pure white Loch Skerrow sand set
in grease, which scythemen universally use in Galloway, cut
through the slumberous hum of the noonday air like the blade
itself through the grass. The bees in the purple flowers beneath
the window boomed a mellow bass, and the grasshoppers made love by
millions in the couch grass, chirring in a thousand fleeting
raptures.

"Wait here while I go in," commanded Winsome, indicating a chair
in the cool, blue-flagged kitchen, which Meg Kissock had marked
out in white, with whorls and crosses of immemorial antiquity--the
same that her Pictish forefathers had cut deep in the hard
Silurian rocks of the southern uplands.

It was a little while before, in the dusk of the doorway Winsome
appeared, looking paler and fairer and more infinitely removed
from him than before. Instinctively he wished himself out with her
again on the broomy knowe. He seemed somehow nearer to her there.
Yet he followed obediently enough.

Within the shadowed "ben"-room of Craig Ronald all the morning
this oddly assorted pair of old people had been sitting--as indeed
every morning they sat, one busily reading and often looking up to
talk; while the other, the master of the house himself, sat
silent, a majestic and altogether pathetic figure, looking
solemnly out with wide-open, dreamy eyes, waking to the actual
world of speech and purposeful life only at rare intervals.

But Walter Skirving was keenly awake when Ralph Peden entered. It
was in fact he, and not his partner, who spoke first--for Walter
Skirving's wife had among other things learned when to be silent--
which was, when she must.

"You honour my hoose," he said; "though it grieves me indeed that
I canna rise to receive yin o' your family an' name! But what I
have is at your service, for it was your noble faither that led
the faithful into the wilderness on the day o' the Great
Apostasy!"

The young man shook him by the hand. He had no bashfulness here.
He was on his own ground. This was the very accent of the society
in which he moved in Edinburgh.

"I thank you," he said, quietly and courteously, stepping back at
once into the student of divinity; "I have often heard my father
speak of you. You were the elder from the south who stood by him
on that day. He has ever retained a great respect for you."

"It WAS a great day," Walter Skirving muttered, letting his arm
rest on the little square deal table which stood beside him with
his great Bible open upon it--"a great day--aye, Maister Peden's
laddie i' my hoose! He's welcome, he's mair nor welcome."

So saying, he turned his eyes once more on the blue mist that
filled the wide Grannoch Valley, and the bees hummed again in the
honey-scented marshmallows so that all heard them.

"This is my grandmother," said Winsome, who stood quite quiet
behind her chair, swinging the sunbonnet in her hand. From her
flower-set corner the old lady held out her band. With a touch of
his father's old-fashioned courtesy he stooped and kissed it.
Winsome instinctively put her hand quickly behind her as though he
had kissed that. Once such practices have a beginning, who knows
where they may end? She had not expected it of him, though,
curiously, she thought no worse of him for his gallantry.

But the lady of Craig Ronald was obviously greatly pleased.

"The lad has guid bluid in him. That's the minnie [mother] o' him,
nae doot. She was a Gilchrist o' Linwood on Nithsdale. What she
saw in your faither to tak' him I dinna ken ony mair than I ken
hoo it cam' to pass that I am the mistress o' Walter Skirving's
hoose the day.--Come oot ahint my chair, lassie; dinna be lauchin'
ahint folks's backs. D'ye think I'm no mistress o' my ain hoose
yet, for a' that ye are sic a grand hoosekeeper wi' your way o't."

The accusation was wholly gratuitous. Winsome had been grave with
a great gravity. But she came obediently out, and seated herself
on a low stool by her grandmother's side. There she sat, holding
her hand, and leaning her elbow on her knee. Ralph thought he had
never seen anything so lovely in his life--an observation entirely
correct. The old lady was clad in a dress of some dark stiff
material, softer than brocade, which, like herself, was more
beautiful in its age than even in youth. Folds of snowy lawn
covered her breast and fell softly about her neck, fastened there
by a plain black pin. Her face was like a portrait by Henry
Raeburn, so beautifully venerable and sweet. The twinkle in her
brown eyes alone told of the forceful and restless spirit which
was imprisoned within. She had been reading a new volume of the
Great Unknown which the Lady Elizabeth had sent her over from the
Big House of Greatorix. She had laid it down on the entry of the
young man. Now she turned sharp upon him.

"Let me look at ye, Maister Ralph Peden. Whaur gat ye the 'Ralph'?
That's nae westland Whig name. Aye, aye, I mind--what's comin' o'
my memory? Yer grandfaither was auld Ralph Gilchrist; but ye dinna
tak' after the Gilchrists--na, na, there was no ane o' them weel
faured--muckle moo'd [large-mouthed] Gilchrists they ca'ed them.
It'll be your faither that you favour."

And she turned him about for inspection with her hand.

"Grandmother--" began Winsome, anxious lest she should say
something to offend the guest of the house. But the lady did not
heed her gentle monition.

"Was't you that ran awa' frae a bonny lass yestreen?" she queried,
sudden as a flash of summer lightning.

It was now the turn of both the younger folk to blush. Winsome
reddened with vexation at the thought that he should think that
she had seen him run and gone about telling of it. Ralph grew
redder and redder, and remained speechless. He did not think of
anything at all.

"I am fond of exercise," he said falteringly.

The gay old lady rippled into a delicious silver stream of
laughter, a little thin, but charmingly provocative. Winsome did
not join, but she looked up imploringly at her grandmother,
leaning her head back till her tresses swept the ground.

When Mistress Skirving recovered herself,

"Exerceese, quo' he, heard ye ever the like o' that? In their
young days lads o' speerit took their exerceese in comin' to see a
bonny lass--juist as I was sayin' to Winifred yestreen nae faurer
gane. Hoot awa', twa young folk! The simmer days are no lang. Waes
me, but I had my share o' them! Tak' them while they shine,
bankside an' burnside an' the bonny heather. Aince they bloomed
for Ailie Gordon. Once she gaed hand in hand alang the braes,
where noo she'll gang nae mair. Awa' wi' ye, ye're young an'
honest. Twa auld cankered carles are no fit company for twa young
folks like you. Awa' wi' ye; dinna be strange wi' his mither's
bairn, say I--an' the guid man hae's spoken for the daddy o' him."

Thus was Ralph Peden made free of the Big Hoose of Craig Ronald.





CHAPTER VIII.

THE MINISTER'S MAN ARMS EOR CONQUEST.


Saunders Mowdiewort, minister's man and grave-digger, was going a
sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his
craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed
upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs,
as Saunders went about his further preparations. Saunders was a
great, soft-bodied, fair man, of the chuby flaxen type so rare in
Scotland--the type which looks at home nowhere but along the south
coast of England. Saunders was about thirty-five. He was a widower
in search of a wife, and made no secret of his devotion to
Margaret Kissock, the "lass" of the farm town of Craig Ronald.

Saunders was slow of speech when in company, and bashful to a
degree. He was accustomed to make up his mind what he would say
before venturing within the range of the sharp tongue of his well-
beloved--an excellent plan, but one which requires for success
both self-possession and a good memory. But for lack of these
Saunders had made an excellent courtier.

Saunders made his toilet in the little stable of the manse above
which he slept. As he scrubbed himself he kept up a constant
sibilant hissing, as though he were an equine of doubtful
steadiness with whom the hostler behooved to be careful. First he
carefully removed the dirt down to a kind of Plimsoll load-line
midway his neck; then he frothed the soap-suds into his red
rectangular ears, which stood out like speaking trumpets; there he
let it remain. Soap is for putting on the face, grease on the
hair. It is folly then to wash either off. Besides being wasteful.
His flaxen hair stood out in wet strands and clammy tags and
tails. All the while Saunders kept muttering to himself:

"An' says I to her: 'Meg Kissock, ye're a bonny woman,' says I.
'My certie, but ye hae e'en like spunkies [will-o'-the-wisps] or
maybes," said Saunders in a meditative tone. "I had better say
'like whurlies in a sky-licht.' It micht be considered mair lovin'
like!"

"Then she'll up an' say: 'Saunders, ye mak' me fair ashamed to
listen to ye. Be mensefu' [polite], can ye no?'"

This pleased Saunders so much that he slapped his thigh so that
the pony started and clattered to the other side of his stall.

"Then I'll up an' tak' her roun' the waist, an' I'll look at her
like this--" (here Saunders practised the effect of his
fascinations in the glass, a panorama which was to some extent
marred by the necessary opening of his mouth to enable the razor
he was using to excavate the bristles out of the professional
creases in his lower jaw. Saunders pulled down his mouth to
express extra grief when a five-foot grave had been ordered. His
seven-foot manifestations of respect for the deceased were a sight
to see. He held the opinion that anybody that had no more 'conceit
o' themsel'' [were so much left to themselves] than to be buried
in a three-foot grave, did not deserve to be mourned at all. This
crease, then, was one of Saunders's assets, and had therefore to
be carefully attended to. Even love must not interfere with it.)

"Sae after that, I shall tak' her roun' the waist, juist like
this--" said he, insinuating his left arm circumferentially. It
was an ill-judged movement, for, instead of circling Meg Kissock's
waist, he extended his arm round the off hindleg of Birsie, the
minister's pony, who had become a trifle short tempered in his old
age. Now it was upon that very leg and at that very place that,
earlier in the day, a large buzzing horse-fly had temporarily
settled. Birsie was in no condition, therefore, for argument upon
the subject. So with the greatest readiness he struck straight out
behind and took Saunders what he himself called a "dinnle on the
elbuck." Nor was this all, for the razor suddenly levered upwards
by Birsie's hoof added another and entirely unprofessional wrinkle
to his face.

Saunders uprose in wrath, for the soap was stinging furiously in
the cut, and expostulated with Birsie with a handful of reins
which he lifted off the lid of the corn-chest.

"Ye ill-natured, thrawn, upsettin' blastie, ye donnart auld
deevil!" he cried.

"Alexander Mowdiewort, gin ye desire to use minced oaths and braid
oaths indiscriminately, ye shall not use them in my stable. Though
ye be but a mere Erastian and uncertain in yer kirk membership, ye
are at least an occasional hearer, whilk is better than naething,
at the kirk o' the Marrow; and what is more to the point, ye are
my own hired servant, and I desire that ye cease from makin' use
o' any such expressions upon my premises."

"Weel, minister," said Saunders, penitently, "I ken brawly I'm i'
the wrang; but ye ken yersel', gin ye had gotten a dinnle i' the
elbuck that garred ye loup like a troot i' Luckie Mowatt's pool,
or gin ye had cuttit yersel' wi' yer ain razor, wad 'Effectual
Callin',' think ye, hae been the first word i' yer mooth? Noo,
minister, fair Hornie!"

"At any rate," said the minister, "what I would have said or done
is no excuse for you, as ye well know. But how did it happen?"

"Weel, sir, ye see the way o't was this: I was thinkin' to mysel',
'There's twa or three ways o' takin' the buiks intil the pulpit--
There's the way consequential--that's Gilbert Prettiman o' the
Kirkland's way. Did ever ye notice the body? He hauds the Bibles
afore him as if he war Moses an' Aaron gaun afore Pharaoh, wi' the
coat-taillies o' him fleein' oot ahint, an' his chin pointin' to
the soon'in'-board o' the pulpit."

"Speak respectfully of the patriarchs," said Mr. Welsh
sententiously. Saunders looked at him with some wonder expressed
in his eyes.

"Far be it frae me," he said, "to speak lichtly o' ony ane o' them
(though, to tell the truth, some o' them war gye boys). I hae been
ower lang connectit wi' them, for I hae carriet the buiks for
fifteen year, ever since my faither racket himsel' howkin' the
grave o' yer predecessor, honest man, an' I hae leeved a' my days
juist ower the wa' frae the kirk."

"But then they say, Saunders," said the minister, smilingly, "'the
nearer the kirk the farther frae grace.'"

"'Deed, minister," said Saunders, "Grace Kissock is a nice bit
lassie, but an' Jess will be no that ill in a year or twa, but o'
a' the Kissocks commend me till Meg. She wad mak' a graund wife.
What think ye, minister?"

Mr. Welsh relaxed his habitual severe sadness of expression and
laughed a little. He was accustomed to the sudden jumps which his
man's conversation was wont to take.

"Nay," he said, "but that is a question for you, Saunders. It is
not I that think of marrying her."

"The Lord be thankit for that! for gin the minister gaed speerin',
what chance wad there be for the betheral?"

"Have you spoken to Meg herself yet?" asked Mr. Welsh.

"Na," said Saunders; "I haena that, though I hae made up my mind
to hae it oot wi' her this verra nicht--if sae it micht be that ye
warna needin' me, that is--" he added, doubtfully, "but I hae guid
reason to hope that Meg--"

"What reason have you, Saunders? Has Margaret expressed a
preference for you in any way?"

"Preference!" said Saunders; "'deed she has that, minister; a
maist marked preference. It was only the last Tuesday afore
Whussanday [Whitsunday] that she gied me a clour [knock] i' the
lug that fair dang me stupid. Caa that ye nocht?"

"Well, Saunders," said the minister, going out, "certainly I wish
you good speed in your wooing; but see that you fall no more out
with Birsie, lest you be more bruised than you are now; and for
the rest, learn wisely to restrain your unruly member."

"Thank ye, minister," said Saunders; "I'll do my best endeavours
to obleege ye. Meg's clours are to be borne wi' a' complaisancy,
but Birsie's dunts are, so to speak, gratuitous!"





CHAPTER IX.

THE ADVENT OF THE CUIF.


"Here's the Cuif!" said Meg Kissock, who with her company gown on,
and her face glowing from a brisk wash, sat knitting a stocking in
the rich gloaming light at the gable end of the house of Craig
Ronald. Winsome usually read a book, sitting by the window which
looked up the long green croft to the fir-woods and down to the
quiet levels of Loch Grannoch, on which the evening mist was
gathering a pale translucent blue. It was a common thing for Meg
and Jessie Kissock to bring their knitting and darning there, and
on their milking-stools sit below the window. If Winsome were in a
mood for talk she did not read much, but listened instead to the
brisk chatter of the maids. Sometimes the ploughmen, Jock Forrest
and Ebie Farrish, came to "ca' the crack," and it was Winsome's
delight on these occasions to listen to the flashing claymore of
Meg Kissock's rustic wit. Before she settled down, Meg had taken
in the three tall candles "ben the hoose," where the old people
sat--Walter Skirving, as ever, silent and far away, his wife deep
in some lively book lent her by the Lady Elizabeth out of the
library of Greatorix Castle.

A bank of wild thyme lay just beneath Winsome's window, and over
it the cows were feeding, blowing softly through their nostrils
among the grass and clover till the air was fragrant with their
balmy breath.

"Guid e'en to ye, 'Cuif,'" cried Meg Kissock as soon as Saunders
Mowdiewort came within earshot. He came stolidly forward tramping
through the bog with his boots newly greased with what remained of
the smooth candle "dowp" with which he had sleeked his flaxen
locks. He wore a broad blue Kilmarnock bonnet, checked red and
white in a "dam-brod" [draught-board] pattern round the edge, and
a blue-buttoned coat with broad pearl buttons. It may be well to
explain that there is a latent meaning, apparent only to Galloway
folk of the ancient time, in the word "cuif." It conveys at once
the ideas of inefficiency and folly, of simplicity and the
ignorance of it. The cuif is a feckless person of the male sex,
who is a recognized butt for a whole neighbourhood to sharpen its
wits upon.

The particular cuif so addressed by Meg came slowly over the
knoll.

"Guid e'en to ye," he said, with his best visiting manners.

"Can ye no see me as weel, Saunders?" said Jess, archly, for all
was grist that came to her mill.

Saunders rose like a trout to the fly.

"Ow aye, Jess, lass, I saw ye brawly, but it disna do to come
seekin' twa lasses at ae time."'

"Dinna ye be thinkin' to put awa' Meg, an' then come coortin' me!"
said Jess, sharply.

Saunders was hurt for the moment at this pointed allusion both to
his profession and also to his condition as a "seekin'" widower.

"Wha seeks you, Jess, 'ill be sair ill-aff!" he replied very
briskly for a cuif.

The sound of Meg's voice in round altercation with Jock Gordon,
the privileged "natural" or innocent fool of the parish,
interrupted this interchange of amenities, which was indeed as
friendly and as much looked for between lads and lasses as the
ordinary greeting of "Weel, hoo's a' wi' ye the nicht?" which
began every conversation between responsible folks.

"Jock Gordon, ye lazy ne'er-do-weel, ye hinna carried in a single
peat, an' it comin' on for parritch-time. D'ye think my maister
can let the like o' you sorn on him, week in, week oot, like a
mawk on a sheep's hurdie? Gae wa' oot o' that, lyin' sumphin'
[sulking] an' sleepin' i' the middle o' the forenicht, an' carry
the water for the boiler an' bring in the peats frae the stack."

Then there arose a strange elricht quavering voice--the voice of
those to whom has not been granted their due share of wits. Jock
Gordon was famed all over the country for his shrewd replies to
those who set their wits in contest with his. Jock is remembered
on all Deeside, and even to Nithsdale. He was a man well on in
years at this time, certainly not less than forty-five. But on his
face there was no wrinkle set, not a fleck of gray upon his
bonnetless fox-red shock of hair, weather-rusted and usually stuck
full of feathers and short pieces of hay. Jock Gordon was
permitted to wander as a privileged visitor through the length and
breadth of the south hill country. He paid long visits to Craig
Ronald, where he had a great admiration and reverence for the
young mistress, and a hearty detestation for Meg Kissock, who, as
he at all times asserted, "was the warst maister to serve atween
the Cairnsmuirs."

"Richt weel I'll do yer biddin', Meg Kissock," he answered in his
shrill falsetto, "but no for your sake or the sake o' ony
belangin' to you. But there's yae bonny doo [dove], wi' her hair
like gowd, an' a fit that she micht set on Jock Gordon's neck, an'
it wad please him weel. An' said she, 'Do the wark Meg Kissock
bids ye,' so Jock Gordon, Lord o' Kelton Hill an' Earl o'
Clairbrand, will perform a' yer wull. Otherwise it's no in any
dochter o' Hurkle-backit [bent-backed] Kissock to gar Jock Gordon
move haund or fit."

So saying, Jock clattered away with his water-pails, muttering to
himself.

Meg Kissock came out again to sit down on her milking-stool under
the westward window, within which was Winsome Charteris, reading
her book unseen by the last glow of the red west.

Jess and Saunders Mowdiewort had fallen silent. Jess had said her
say, and did not intend to exert herself to entertain her sister's
admirer. Jess was said to look not unkindly on Ebie Farrish, the
younger ploughman who had recently come to Craig Ronald from one
of the farms at the "laigh" end of the parish. Ebie had also, it
was said, with better authority, a hanging eye to Jess, who had
the greater reason to be kind to him, that he was the first since
her return from England who had escaped the more BRAVURA
attractions of her sister.

"Can ye no find a seat guid eneuch to sit doon on, cuif?" inquired
Meg with quite as polite an intention as though she had said, "Be
so kind as to take a seat." The cuif, who had been uneasily
balancing himself first on one foot and then on the other, and
apologetically passing his hand over the sleek side of his head
which was not covered by the bonnet, replied gratefully:

"'Deed I wull that, Meg, since ye are sae pressin'."

He went to the end of the milk-house, selected a small tub used
for washing the dishes of red earthenware and other domestic small
deer, turned it upside down, and seated himself as near to Meg as
he dared. Then he tried to think what it was he had intended to
say to her, but the words somehow would not now come at call.
Before long he hitched his seat a little nearer, as though his
present position was not quite comfortable.

But Meg checked him sharply.

"Keep yer distance, cuif," she said; "ye smell o' the muils"
[churchyard earth].

"Na, na, Meg, ye ken brawly I haena been howkin' [digging] since
Setterday fortnicht, when I burriet Tarn Rogerson's wife's guid-
brither's auntie, that leeved grainin' an' deein' a' her life wi'
the rheumatics an' wame disease, an' died at the last o' eatin'
swine's cheek an' guid Cheddar cheese thegither at Sandy
Mulquharchar's pig-killin'."

"Noo, cuif," said Meg, with an accent of warning in her voice,
"gin ye dinna let alane deevin' [deafening] us wi' yer kirkyaird
clavers, ye'll no sit lang on my byne" [tub].

From the end of the peat-stack, out of the dark hole made by the
excavation of last winter's stock of fuel, came the voice of Jock
Gordon, singing:

    "The deil he sat on the high lumtap,
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!
    Gang yer ways and drink yer drap,
    Ye'll need it a' whan ye come to stap
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!

    "Hieland kilt an' Lawland hose,
    Parritch-fed an' reared on brose,
    Ye'll drink nae drap whan ye come tae stap
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!"

Meg Kissock and her sweetheart stopped to listen. Saunders
Mowdiewort smiled an unprofessional smile when he heard the song
of the natural. "That's a step ayont the kirkyaird, Meg," he said.
"Gin ye hae sic objections to hear aboot honest men in their
honest graves, what say ye to that elricht craitur scraichin'
aboot the verra deil an' his hearth-stane?"

Certainly it sounded more than a trifle uncanny in the gloaming,
coming out of that dark place where even in the daytime the black
Galloway rats cheeped and scurried, to hear the high, quavering
voice of Jock Gordon singing his unearthly rhymes.

By-and-bye those at the house gable could see that the innocent
had climbed to the top of the peat-stack in some elvish freak, and
sat there cracking his thumbs and singing with all his might:

    "HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!"

"Come doon oot o' that this meenit, Jock Gordon, ye gomeral!"
cried Meg, shaking her fist at the uncouth shape twisting and
singing against the sunset sky like one demented.

The song stopped, and Jock Gordon slowly turned his head in their
direction. All were looking towards him, except Ebie Farrish, the
new ploughman, who was wondering what Jess Kissock would do if he
put his arm around her waist.

"What said ye?" Jock asked from his perch on the top of the peat-
stack.

"Hae ye fetched in the peats an' the water, as I bade ye?" asked
Meg, with great asperity in her voice. "D'ye think that ye'll win
aff ony the easier in the hinnerend, by sittin' up there like yin
o' his ain bairns, takkin' the deil's name in vain?"

"Gin ye dinna tak' tent to [care of] yersel', Meg Kissock,"
retorted Jock, "wi' yer eternal yammer o' 'Peats, Jock Gordon, an'
'Water, Jock Gordon,' ye'll maybes find yersel' whaur Jock
Gordon'll no be there to serve ye; but the Ill Auld Boy'll keep ye
in routh o' peats, never ye fret, Meg Kissock, wi' that reed-heed
[red head] o' yours to set them a-lunt [on fire]. Faith an' ye may
cry 'Water! water!' till ye crack yer jaws, but nae Jock Gordon
there--na, na--nae Jock Gordon there. Jock kens better."

But at this moment there was a prolonged rumble, and the whole
party sitting by the gable end (the "gavel," as it was locally
expressed) rose to their feet from tub and hag-clog and milking-
stool. There had been a great land-slip. The whole side of the
peat-stack had tumbled bodily into the great "black peat-hole"
from which the winter's peats had come, and which was a favourite
lair of Jock's own, being ankle-deep in fragrant dry peat "coom"--
which is, strange to say, a perfectly clean and even a luxurious
bedding, far to be preferred as a couch to "flock" or its kindred
abominations.

All the party ran forward to see what had become of Jock, whose
song had come to so swift a close.

Out of the black mass of down-fallen peat there came a strange,
pleading voice.

"O guid deil, O kind deil, dinna yirk awa' puir Jock to that ill
bit--puir Jock, that never yet did ye ony hairm, but aye wished ye
weel! Lat me aff this time, braw deil, an' I'll sing nae mair ill
gangs aboot ye!"

"Save us!" exclaimed Meg Kissock, "the craitur's prayin' to the
Ill Body himsel'."

Ebbie Farrish began to clear away the peat, which was, indeed, no
difficult task. As he did so, the voice of Jock Gordon mounted
higher and higher:

"O mercy me, I hear them clawin' and skrauchelin'! Dinna let the
wee yins wi' the lang riven taes and the nebs like gleds [beaks
like kites] get haud o' me! I wad rayther hae yersel', Maister o'
Sawtan, for ye are a big mensefu' deil. Ouch! I'm dune for noo,
althegither; he haes gotten puir Jock! Sirce me, I smell the
reekit rags o' him!"

But it was only Ebie Farrish that had him by the roll of ancient
cloth which served as a collar for Jock's coat. When he was pulled
from under the peats and set upon his feet, he gazed around with a
bewildered look.

"O man, Ebie Farrish," he said solemnly, "If I didna think ye war
the deil himsel'--ye see what it is to be misled by ootward
appearances!"

There was a shout of laughter at the expense of Ebie, in which Meg
thought that she heard an answering ripple from within Winsome's
room.

"Surely, Jock, ye were never prayin' to the deil?" asked Meg from
the window, very seriously. "Ye ken far better than that."

"An' what for should I no pray to the deil? He's a desperate
onsonsy chiel yon. It's as weel to be in wi' him as oot wi' him
ony day. Wha' kens what's afore them, or wha they may be behaudin'
to afore the morrow's morn?" answered Jock stoutly.

"But d'ye ken," said John Scott, the theological herd, who had
quietly "daundered doon" as he said, from his cot-house up on the
hill, where his bare-legged bairns played on the heather and short
grass all day, to set his shoulder against the gable end for an
hour with the rest.

"D'ye ken what Maister Welsh was sayin' was the new doctrine amang
thae New Licht Moderates--'hireling shepherds,' he ca'd them? Noo
I'm no on mysel' wi' sae muckle speakin' aboot the deil. But the
minister was sayin' that the New Moderates threep [assert] that
there's nae deil at a'. He dee'd some time since!"

"Gae wa' wi' ye, John Scott! wha's gaun aboot doin' sae muckle ill
then, I wad like to ken?" said Meg Kissock.

"Dinna tell me," said Jock Gordon, "that the puir deil's deed, and
that we'll hae to pit up wi' Ebie Farrish. Na, na, Jock's maybe
daft, but he kens better than that!"

"They say," said John Scott, pulling meditatively at his cutty,
"that the pooer is vested noo in a kind o' comy-tee [committee]!"

"I dinna haud wi' comy-tees mysel'," replied Meg; "it's juist
haein' mony maisters, ilka yin mair cankersome and thrawn than
anither!"

"Weel, gin this news be true, there's a heep o' fowk in this
parish should be mentioned in his wull," said Jock Gordon,
significantly. "They're near kin till him--forby a heep o' bairns
that he has i' the laich-side o' the loch. They're that hard
there, they'll no gie a puir body a meal o' meat or the shelter o'
a barn."

"But," said Ebie Farrish, who had been thinking that, after all,
the new plan might have its conveniences, "gin there's nae deil to
tempt, there'll be nae deil to punish."

But the herd was a staunch Marrow man. He was not led away by any
human criticism, nor yet by the new theology.

"New Licht here, New Licht there," he said; "I canna' pairt wi' ma
deil. Na, na, that's ower muckle to expect o' a man o' my age!"

Having thus defined his theological position, without a word more
he threw his soft checked plaid of Galloway wool over his
shoulders, and fell into the herd's long swinging heather step,
mounting the steep brae up to his cot on the hillside as easily as
if he were walking along a level road.

There was a long silence; then a ringing sound, sudden and sharp,
and Ebie Farrish fell inexplicably from the axe-chipped hag-clog,
which he had rolled up to sit upon. Ebie had been wondering for
more than an hour what would happen if he put his arm round Jess
Kissock's waist. He knew now.

Then, after a little Saunders Mowdiewort, who was not unmindful of
his prearranged programme nor yet oblivious of the flight of time,
saw the stars come out, he knew that if he were to make any
progress, he must make haste; so he leaned over towards his
sweetheart and whispered, "Meg, my lass, ye're terrible bonny."

"D'ye think ye are the first man that has telled me that, cuif?"
said Meg, with point and emphasis.

Jock Forrest, the senior ploughman--a very quiet, sedate man with
a seldom stirred but pretty wit, laughed a short laugh, as though
he knew something about that. Again there was a silence, and as
the night wind began to draw southward in cool gulps of air off
the hills, Winsome Charteris's window was softly closed.

"Hae ye nocht better than that to tell us, cuif?" said Meg,
briskly, "nocht fresh-like?"

"Weel," said Saunders Mowdiewort, groping round for a subject of
general interest, his profession and his affection being alike
debarred, "there's that young Enbra' lad that's come till the
manse. He's a queer root, him."

"What's queer aboot him?" asked Meg, in a semi-belligerent manner.
A young man who had burned his fingers for her mistress's sake
must not be lightly spoken of.

"Oh, nocht to his discredit ava, only Manse Bell heard him arguin'
wi' the minister aboot the weemen-folk the day that he cam'. He
canna' bide them, she says."

"He has but puir taste," said Ebie Farrish; "a snod bit lass is
the bonniest work o' Natur'. Noo for mysel'--"

"D'ye want anither?" asked Jess, without apparent connection.

"He'll maybe mend o' that opeenion, as mony a wise man has dune
afore him," said Meg, sententiously. "Gae on, cuif; what else
aboot the young man?"

"Oh, he's a lad o' great lear. He can read ony language back or
forrit, up or doon, as easy as suppin' sowens. He can speak
byordinar' graund. They say he'll beat the daddy o' him for
preachin' when he's leecensed. He rade Birsie this mornin' too,
after the kickin' randie had cuist me aff his back like a draff
sack."

"Then what's queer aboot him?" said Jess.

Meg said nothing. She felt a draft of air suck into Winsome's
room, so that she knew that the subject was of such interest that
her mistress had again opened her window. Meg leaned back so far
that she could discern a glint of yellow hair in the darkness.

The cuif was about to light his pipe. Meg stopped him.

"Nane o' yer lichts here, cuif," she said; "it's time ye were
thinkin' aboot gaun ower the hill. But ye haena' telled us yet
what's queer aboot the lad."

"Weel, woman, he's aye write--writin', whiles on sheets o' paper,
and whiles on buiks."

"There's nocht queer aboot that," says Meg; "so does ilka
minister."

"But Manse Bell gied me ane o' his writings, that she had gotten
aboot his bedroom somewhere. She said that the wun' had blawn't
aff his table, but I misdoot her."

"Yer ower great wi' Manse Bell an' the like o' her, for a man that
comes to see me!" said Meg, who was a very particular young woman
indeed.

"It was cuttit intil lengths like the metre psalms, but it luikit
gye an' daft like, sae I didna' read it," said the cuif hastily.
"Here it's to ye, Meg. I was e'en gaun to licht my cutty wi't."
Something shone gray-white in Saunders's hand as he held it out to
Meg, It passed into Meg's palm, and then was seen no more.

The session at the house end was breaking up. Jess had vanished
silently. Ebie Farrish was not. Jock Forrest had folded his tent
and stolen away. Meg and Saunders were left alone. It was his
supreme opportunity.

He leaned over towards his sweetheart. His blue bonnet had fallen
to the ground, and there was a distinct odour of warm candle-
grease in the air.

"Meg," he said, "yer maist amazin' bonny, an' I'm that fond o' ye
that I am faain' awa' frae my meat! O Meg, woman, I think o' ye i'
the mornin' afore the Lord's Prayer, I sair misdoot! Guid forgie
me! I find mysel' whiles wonderin' gin I'll see ye the day afore I
can gang ower in my mind the graves that's to howk, or gin
Birsie's oats are dune. O Meg, Meg, I'm that fell fond o' ye that
I gruppit that thrawn speldron Birsie's hint leg juist i' the
fervour o' thinkin' o' ye."

"Hoo muckle hae ye i' the week?" said Meg, practically, to bring
the matter to a point.

"A pound a week," said Saunders Mowdiewort, promptly, who though a
cuif was a business man, "an' a cottage o' three rooms wi' a
graun' view baith back an' front!"

"Ow aye," said Meg, sardonically, "I ken yer graund view. It's o'
yer last wife's tombstane, wi' the inscriptions the length o' my
airm aboot Betty Mowdiewort an' a' her virtues, that Robert
Paterson cuttit till ye a year past in Aprile. Na, na, ye'll no
get me to leeve a' my life lookin' oot on that ilk' time I wash my
dishes. It wad mak' yin be wantin' to dee afore their time to get
sic-like. Gang an' speer [ask] Manse Bell. She's mair nor half
blind onyway, an' she's fair girnin' fain for a man, she micht
even tak' you."

With these cruel words Meg lifted her milking-stool and vanished
within. The cuif sat for a long time on his byne lost in thought.
Then he arose, struck his flint and steel together, and stood
looking at the tinder burning till it went out, without having
remembered to put it to the pipe which he held in his other hand.
After the last sparks ran every way and flickered, he threw the
glowing red embers on the ground, kicked the pail on which he had
been sitting as solemnly as if he had been performing a duty to
the end of the yard, and then stepped stolidly into the darkness.

The hag-clog was now left alone against the wall beneath Winsome's
window, within which there was now the light of a candle and a
waxing and waning shadow on the blind as some one went to and fro.
Then there was a sharp noise as of one clicking in the "steeple"
or brace of the front door (which opened in two halves), and then
the metallic grit of the key in the lock, for Craig Ronald was a
big house, and not a mere farm which might be left all night with
unbarred portals.

Winsome stepped lightly to her own door, which opened without
noise. She looked out and said, in a compromise between a coaxing
whisper and a voice of soft command:

"Meg, I want ye."

Meg Kissock came along the passage with the healthy glow of the
night air on her cheeks, and her candle in her hand. She seemed as
if she would pause at the door, but Winsome motioned her
imperiously within. So Meg came within, and Winsome shut to the
door. Then she simply held out her hand, at which Meg gazed as
silently.

"Meg!" said Winsome, warningly.

A queer, faint smile passed momentarily over the face of Winsome's
handmaid, as though she had been long trying to solve some problem
and had suddenly and unexpectedly found the answer. Slowly she
lifted up her dark-green druggit skirt, and out of a pocket of
enormous size, which was swung about her waist like a captured
leviathan heaving inanimate on a ship's cable, she extracted a
sheet of crumpled paper.

Winsome took it without a word. Her eye said "Good-night" to Meg
as plain as the minister's text.

Meg Kissock waited till she was at the door, and then, just as she
was making her silent exit, she said:

"Ye'll tak' as guid care o't as the ither yin ye fand. Ye can pit
them baith thegither."

Winsome took a step towards her as if with some purpose of
indignant chastisement. But the red head and twinkling eyes of
mischief vanished, and Winsome stood with the paper in her hand.
Just as she had begun to smooth out the crinkles produced by the
hands of Manse Bell who could not read it, Saunders who would not,
and Meg Kissock who had not time to read it, the head of the last
named was once more projected into the room, looking round the
edge of the rose-papered door.

"Ye'll mak' a braw mistress o' the manse, Mistress--Ralph--
Peden!" she said, nodding her head after each proper name.





CHAPTER X.

THE LOVE-SONG OF THE MAVIS.


Winsome stamped her little foot in real anger now, and crumpling
the paper in her hand she threw it indignantly on the floor. She
was about to say something to Meg, but that erratic and privileged
domestic was in her own room by this time at the top of the house,
with the door barred.

But something like tears stood in Winsome's eyes. She was very
angry indeed. She would speak to Meg in the morning. She was
mistress of the house, and not to be treated as a child. Meg
should have her warning to leave at the term. It was ridiculous
the way that she had taken to speaking to her lately. It was clear
that she had been allowing her far too great liberties. It did not
occur to Winsome Charteris that Meg had been accustomed to tease
her in something like this manner about every man under forty who
had come to Craig Ronald on any pretext whatever--from young
Johnnie Dusticoat, the son of the wholesale meal-miller from
Dumfries, to Agnew Greatorix, eldest son of the Lady Elizabeth,
who came over from the castle with books for her grandmother
rather oftener than might be absolutely necessary, and who, though
a papist, had waited for Winsome three Sabbath days at the door of
the Marrow kirk, a building which he had never previously entered
during his life.

Winsome went indignant to bed. It was altogether too aggravating
that Meg should take on so, she said to herself.

"Of course I do not care a button," she said as she turned her hot
cheek upon the pillow and looked towards the pale gray-blue of the
window-panes, in which there was already the promise of the
morning; though yet it was hardly midnight of the short midsummer
of the north.

"It would be too ridiculous to suppose that I should care for
anybody whom I have only seen twice. Why, it was more than a year
before I really cared for dear old grannie! Meg might know better,
and it is very silly of her to say things like that. I shall send
back his book and paper to-morrow morning by Andrew Kissock when
he goes to school." Still even after this resolution she lay
sleepless.

"Now I will go to sleep," said Winsome, resolutely shutting her
eyes. "I will not think about him any more." Which was assuredly a
noble and fitting resolve. But Winsome had yet to discover in
restless nights and troubled morrows that sleep and thought are
two gifts of God which do not come or go at man's bidding. In her
silent chamber there seemed to be a kind of hushed yet palpable
life. It seemed to Winsome as if there were about her a thousand
little whispering voices. Unseen presences flitted everywhere. She
could hear them laughing such wicked, mocking laughs. They were
clustering round the crumpled piece of paper in the corner. Well,
it might lie there forever for her.

"I would not read it even if it were light. I shall send it back
to him to-morrow without reading it. Very likely it is a Greek
exercise, at any rate."

Yet, for all these brave sayings, neither sleep nor dawn had come,
when, clad in shadowy white and the more manifest golden glimmer
of her hair, she glided to the windowseat, and drawing a great
knitted shawl about her, she sat, a slender figure enveloped from
head to foot in sheeny white. The shawl imprisoned the pillow
tossed masses of her rippling hair, throwing them forward about
her face, which, in the half light, seemed to be encircled with an
aureole of pale Florentine gold.

In her hand Winsome held Ralph Peden's poem, and in spite of her
determination not to read it, she sat waiting till the dawn should
come. It might be something of great importance. It might only be
a Greek exercise. It was, at all events, necessary to find out, in
order that she might send it back.

It was a marvellous dawning, this one that Winsome waited for.
Dawn is the secret of the universe. It thrills us somehow with a
far-off prophecy of that eternal dawning when the God That Is
shall reveal himself--the dawning which shall brighten into the
more perfect day.

It was just the slack water--the water-shed of the night. So clear
it was this June night that the lingering gold behind the western
ridge of the Orchar Hill, where the sun went down, was neither
brighter nor yet darker than the faint tinge of lucent green, like
the colour of the inner curve of the sea-wave just as it bends to
break, which had begun to glow behind the fir woods to the east.

The birds were waking sleepily. Chaffinches began their clear,
short, natural bursts of song. "CHURR!" said the last barn owl as
he betook himself to bed. The first rook sailed slowly overhead
from Hensol wood. He was seeking the early worm. The green lake in
the east was spreading and taking a roseate tinge just where it
touched the pines on the rugged hillside.

Beneath Winsome's window a blackbird hopped down upon the grass
and took a tentative dab or two at the first slug he came across;
but it was really too early for breakfast for a good hour yet, so
he flew up again into a bush and preened his feathers, which had
been discomposed by the limited accommodation of the night. Now he
was on the topmost twig, and Winsome saw him against the crimson
pool which was fast deepening in the east.

Suddenly his mellow pipe fluted out over the grove. Winsome
listened as she had never listened before. Why had it become so
strangely sweet to listen to the simple sounds? Why did the rich
Tyrian dye of the dawn touch her cheek and flush the flowering
floss of her silken hair? A thrush from the single laurel at the
gate told her:

      "There--there--there--" he sang,
    "Can't you see, can't you see, can't you see it?
      Love is the secret, the secret!
    Could you but know it, did you but show it!
          Hear me! hear me! hear me!
      Down in the forest I loved her!
            Sweet, sweet, sweet!
            Would you but listen,
              I would love you!
      All is sweet and pure and good!
        Twilight and morning dew,
              I love it, I love it,
        Do you, do you, do you?"

This was the thrush's love-song. Now it was light enough for
Winsome to read hers by the red light of the midsummer's dawn.
This was Ralph's Greek exercise:

  "Sweet mouth, red lips, broad unwrinkled brow,
  Sworn troth, woven hands, holy marriage vow,
  Unto us make answer, what is wanting now?
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow;
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago.

  "Broad lands, bright sun, as it was of old;
  Red wine, loud mirth, gleaming of the gold;
  Something yet a-wanting--how shall it be told?
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow;
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago.

  "Large heart, true love, service void of sound,
  Life-trust, death-trust, here on Scottish ground,
  As in olden story, surely I have found--
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow,
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago."

The thrush had ceased singing while Winsome read. It was another
voice which she heard--the first authentic call of the springtime
for her. It coursed through her blood. It quickened her pulse. It
enlarged the pupil of her eye till the clear germander blue of the
iris grew moist and dark. It was a song for her heart, and hers
alone. She felt it, though no more than a leaf blown to her by
chance winds. It might have been written for any other, only she
knew that it was not. Ralph Peden had said nothing. The poem
certainly did not suggest a student of divinity in the Kirk of the
Marrow. There were a thousand objections--a thousand reasons--
every one valid, against such a thing. But love that laughs at
locksmiths is equally contemptuous of logic. It was hers, hers,
and hers alone. A breath from Love's wing as he passed came again
to Winsome. The blackbird was silent, but a thrush this time broke
in with his jubilant love-song, while Winsome, with her love-song
laid against a dewy cheek, paused to listen with a beating heart
and a new comprehension:

        "Hear! hear! hear!
          Dear! dear! dear!
    Far away, far away, far away,
      I saw him pass this way,
    Tirrieoo, tirrieoo! so tender and true,
      Chippiwee, chippiwee, oh, try him and see!
    Cheer up! cheer up! cheer up!
      He'll come and he'll kiss you,
      He'll kiss you and kiss you,
    And I'll see him do it, do it, do it!"

"Go away, you wicked bird!" said Winsome, when the master singer
in speckled grey came to this part of his song. So saying, she
threw, with such exact aim that it went in an entirely opposite
direction, a quaint, pink seashell at the bird, a shell which had
been given her by a lad who was going away again to sea three
years ago. She was glad now, when she thought of it, that she had
kissed him because he had no mother, for he never came back any
more.

"Keck, keck!" said the mavis indignantly, and went away.

Then Winsome lay down on her white bed well content, and pillowed
her cheek on a crumpled piece of paper.





CHAPTER XI

ANDREW KISSOCK GOES TO SCHOOL.


Love is, at least in maidens' hearts, of the nature of an
intermittent fever. The tide of Solway flows, but the more rapid
his flow the swifter his ebb. The higher it brings the wrack up
the beach, the deeper, six hours after, are laid bare the roots of
the seaweed upon the shingle. Now Winsome Charteris, however her
heart might conspire against her peace, was not at all the girl to
be won before she was asked. Also there was that delicious spirit
of contrariness that makes a woman even when won, by no means seem
won.

Besides, in the broad daylight of common day she was less attuned
and touched to earnest issues than in the red dawn. She had even
taken the poem and the exercise book out of the sacred enclosure,
where they had been hid so long. She did not really know that she
could make good any claim to either. Indeed, she was well aware
that to one of them at least she had no claim whatever. Therefore
she had placed both the note-book and the poem within the same
band as her precious housekeeping account-book, which she
reverenced next her Bible--which very practical proceeding pleased
her, and quite showed that she was above all foolish sentiment.
Then she went to churn for an hour and a half, pouring in a little
hot water critically from time to time in order to make the butter
come. This exercise may be recommended as an admirable corrective
to foolish flights of imagination. There is something concrete
about butter-making which counteracts an overplus of sentiment--
especially when the butter will not come. And hot water may be
overdone.

Now Winsome Charteris was a hard-hearted young woman--a fact that
may not as yet have appeared; at least so she told herself. She
had come to the conclusion that she had been foolish to think at
all of Ralph Peden, so she resolved to put him at once and
altogether out of her mind, which, as every one knows, is quite a
simple matter. Yet during the morning she went three times into
her little room to look at her housekeeping book, which by
accident lay within the same band as Ralph Peden's lost
manuscripts. First, she wanted to see how much she got for butter
at Cairn Edward the Monday before last; then to discover what the
price was on that very same day last year. It is an interesting
thing to follow the fluctuations of the produce market, especially
when you churn the butter yourself. The exact quotation of
documents is a valuable thing to learn. Nothing is so likely to
grow upon one as a habit of inaccuracy. This was what her
grandmother was always telling her, and it behooved Winsome to
improve. Each time as she strapped the documents together she
said, "And these go back to-day by Andra Kissock when he goes to
school." Then she took another look, in order to assure herself
that no forgeries had been introduced within the band while she
was churning the butter. They were still quite genuine.

Winsome went out to relieve Jess Kissock in the dairy, and as she
went she communed with herself: "It is right that I should send
them back. The verses may belong to somebody else--somebody in
Edinburgh--and, besides, I know them by heart."

A good memory is a fine thing.

The Kissocks lived in one of the Craig Ronald cot-houses. Their
father had in his time been one of the herds, and upon his death,
many years ago, Walter Skirving had allowed the widow and children
to remain in the house in which Andrew Kissock, senior, had died.
Mistress Kissock was a large-boned, soft-voiced woman, who had
supplied what dash of tenderness there was in her daughters. She
had reared them according to good traditions, but as she said,
when all her brood were talking at the same time, she alone
quietly silent:

"The Kissocks tak' efter their faither, they're great hands to
talk--a' bena [except] An'ra'."

Andrew was her youngest, a growing lump of a boy of twelve, who
was exceeding silent in the house. Every day Andra betook himself
to school, along the side of Loch Grannoch, by the path which
looked down on the cloud-flecked mirror of the loch. Some days he
got there, but very occasionally.

His mother had got him ready early this June morning. He had
brought in the kye for Jess. He had helped Jock Gordon to carry
water for Meg's kitchen mysteries. He had listened to a brisk
conversation proceeding from the "room" where his very capable
sister was engaged in getting the old people settled for the day.
All this was part of the ordinary routine. As soon as the whole
establishment knew that Walter Skirving was again at the window
over the marshmallows, and his wife at her latest book, a sigh of
satisfaction went up and the wheels of the day's work revolved. So
this morning it came time for Andra to go to school all too soon.
Andra did not want to stay at home from school, but it was against
the boy's principle to appear glad to go to school, so Andra made
it a point of honour to make a feint of wanting to stay every
morning.

"Can I no bide an' help ye wi' the butter-kirnin' the day, Jess?"
said Andra, rubbing himself briskly all over as he had seen the
ploughmen do with their horses. When he got to his bare red legs
he reared and kicked out violently, calling out at the same time:

"Wad ye then, ye tairger, tuts--stan' still there, ye kickin'
beast!" as though he were some fiery untamed from the desert.

Jess made a dart at him with a wet towel.

"Gang oot o' my back kitchen wi' yer nonsense!" she said. Andra
passaged like a strongly bitted charger to the back door, and
there ran away with himself, flourishing in the air a pair of very
dirty heels. Ebie Farrish was employed over a tin basin at the
stable door, making his breakfast toilet, which he always
undertook, not when he shook himself out of bed in the stable loft
at five o'clock, but before he went in to devour Jess with his
eyes and his porridge in the ordinary way. It was at this point
that Andra Kissock, that prancing Galloway barb, breaking away
from all restrictions, charged between Ebie's legs, and overset
him into his own horse-trough. The yellow soap was in Ebie's eyes,
and before he got it out the small boy was far enough away. The
most irritating thing was that from the back kitchen came peal on
peal of laughter.

"It's surely fashionable at the sea-bathin' to tak' a dook [swim]
in the stable-trough, nae less!"

Ebie gathered himself up savagely. His temperature was something
considerably above summer heat, yet he dared not give expression
to his feelings, for his experiences in former courtships had led
him to the conclusion that you cannot safely, having regard to
average family prejudice, abuse the brothers of your sweetheart.
After marriage the case is believed to be different.

Winsome Charteris stood at the green gate which led out of the
court-yard into the croft, as Andra was making his schoolward
exit. She had a parcel for him. This occasioned no surprise, nor
did the very particular directions as to delivery, and the dire
threatenings against forgetfulness or failure in the least dismay
Andra. He was entirely accustomed to them. From his earliest years
he had heard nothing else. He never had been reckoned as a "sure
hand," and it was only in default of a better messenger that
Winsome employed him. Then these directions were so explicit that
there did not appear to be any possibility of mistake. He had only
to go to the manse and leave the parcel for Mr. Ralph Peden
without a message.

So Andrew Kissock, nothing loath, promised faithfully. He never
objected to promising; that was easy. He carried the small, neatly
wrapped parcel in his hand, walking most sedately so long as
Winsome's eyes were upon him. He was not yet old enough to be
under the spell of the witchery of those eyes; but then Winsome's
eye controlled his sister Meg's hand, and for that latter organ he
had a most profound respect.

Now we must take the trouble to follow in some detail the course
of this small boy going to school, for though it may be of no
interest in itself save as a study in scientific procrastination,
a good deal of our history directly depends upon it.

As soon as Andrew was out of sight he pulled his leather satchel
round so that he could open it with ease, and, having taken a
handful of broken and very stale crumbs out of it for immediate
use, he dropped Winsome's parcel within. There it kept company
with a tin flask of milk which his mother filled for him every
morning, having previously scalded it well to restore its
freshness. This was specially carefully done after a sad occasion
upon which his mother, having poured in the fine milk for Andra's
dinner fresh from Crummie the cow, out of the flask mouth there
crawled a number of healthy worms which that enterprising youth
had collected from various quarters which it is best not to
specify. Not that Andra objected in the least. Milk was a good
thing, worms were good things, and he was above the paltry
superstition that one good thing could spoil another. He will
always consider to his dying day that the very sound licking which
his mother administered to him, for spoiling at once the family
breakfast and his own dinner, was one of the most uncalled-for and
gratuitous, which, even in his wide experience, it had been his
lot to recollect.

So Andra took his way to school. He gambolled along, smelling and
rooting among the ragged robin and starwort in the hedges like an
unbroken collie. It is safe to say that no further thought of
school or message crossed his mind from the moment that the
highest white steading of Craig Ronald sank out of view, until his
compulsory return. Andra had shut out from his view so commonplace
and ignominious facts as home and school.

At the first loaning end, where the road to the Nether Crae came
down to cross the bridge, just at the point where the Grannoch
lane leaves the narrows of the loch, Andra betook himself to the
side of the road, with a certain affectation of superabundant
secrecy.

With prodigious exactness he examined the stones at a particular
part of the dyke, hunted about for one of remarkable size and
colour, said "Hist! hist!" in a mysterious way, and ran across the
road to see that no one was coming.

As we have seen, Andra was the reader of the family. His eldest
brother had gone to America, where he was working in New York as a
joiner. This youth was in the habit of sending across books and
papers describing the terrible encounters with Indians in the
Boone country--the "dark and bloody land" of the early romancers.
Not one in the family looked at the insides of these relations of
marvels except Andra, who, when he read the story of the Indian
scout trailing the murderers of his squaw across a continent in
order to annihilate them just before they entered New York city,
felt that he had found his vocation--which was to be at least an
Indian scout, if indeed it was too late for him to think of being
a full-blooded Indian.

The impressive pantomime at the bridge was in order to ascertain
whether his bosom companion, Dick Little, had passed on before
him. He knew, as soon as he was within a hundred yards of the
stone, that he had NOT passed. Indeed, he could see him at that
very moment threading his way down through the tangle of heather
and bog myrtle, or, as he would have said, "gall busses opposite."
But what of that?--For mighty is the power of make-believe, and in
Andra, repressed as he was at home, there was concentrated the
very energy and power of some imaginative ancestry. He had a full
share of the quality which ran in the family, and was exceeded
only by his brother Jock in New York, who had been "the biggest
leer in the country side" before he emigrated to a land where at
that time this quality was not specially marked among so many
wielders of the long bow. Jock, in his letters, used to frighten
his mother with dark tales of his hair-breadth escapes from
savages and desperadoes on the frontier, yet, strangely enough,
his address remained steadily New York.

Now it is not often that a Galloway boy takes to lying; but when
he does, a mere Nithsdale man has no chance with him, still less a
man from the simple-minded levels of the "Shire."[Footnote:
Wigtonshire is invariably spoken of in Galloway as the Shire,
Kirkcudbrightshire as the Stewardry.] But Andra Kissock always
lied from the highest motives. He elevated the saying of the thing
that was not to the height of a principle. He often lied, knowing
that he would be thrashed for it--even though he was aware that he
would be rewarded for telling the truth. He lied because he would
not demean himself to tell the truth.

It need not therefore surprise us in the least that when Dick
Little came across the bridge he was greeted by Andra Kissock with
the information that he was in the clutches of The Avenger of
Blood, who, mounted upon a mettle steed with remarkably dirty
feet, curveted across the road and held the pass. He was required
to give up a "soda scone or his life." The bold Dick, who had
caught the infection, stoutly refused to yield either. His life
was dear to him, but a soda scone considerably dearer. He had
rather be dead than hungry.

"Then die, traitor!" said Andra, throwing down his bag, all
forgetful of Winsome Charteris's precious parcel and his promises
thereanent. So these two brave champions had at one another with
most surprising valour.

They were armed with wooden swords as long as themselves, which
they manoeuvred with both hands in a marvellously savage manner.
When a blow did happen to get home, the dust flew out of their
jackets. But still the champions fought on. They were in the act
of finishing the quarrel by the submission of Dick in due form,
when Allan Welsh, passing across the bridge on one of his pastoral
visitations, came upon them suddenly. Dick was on his knees at the
time, his hands on the ground, and Andra was forcing his head
determinedly down toward the surface of the king's highway.
Meanwhile Dick was objecting in the most vigorous way.

"Boys," said the stern, quiet voice of the minister, "what are you
doing to each other? Are you aware it is against both the law of
God and man to fight in this way? It is only from the beasts that
perish that we expect such conduct."

"If ye please, sir," answered Andra in a shamefaced way, yet with
the assurance of one who knows that he has the authorities on his
side, "Dick Little wull no bite the dust."

"Bite the dust!--what do you mean, laddie?" asked the minister,
frowning.

"Weel sir, if ye please, sir, the Buik says that the yin that got
his licks fell down and bit the dust. Noo, Dick's doon fair
aneuch. Ye micht speak till him to bite the dust!"

And Andra, clothed in the garments of conscious rectitude, stood
back to give the minister room to deliver his rebuke.

The stern face of the minister relaxed.

"Be off with you to school," he said; "I'll look in to see if you
have got there in the afternoon."

Andra and Dick scampered down the road, snatching their satchels
as they ran. In half an hour they were making momentary music
under the avenging birch rod of Duncan Duncanson, the learned
Dullarg schoolmaster. Their explanations were excellent. Dick said
that he had been stopped to gather the eggs, and Andra that he had
been detained conversing with the minister. The result was the
same in both cases--Andra getting double for sticking to his
statement. Yet both stories were true, though quite accidentally
so, of course. This is what it is to have a bad character. Neither
boy, however, felt any ill-will whatever at the schoolmaster. They
considered that he was there in order to lick them. For this he
was paid by their parents' money, and it would have been a fraud
if he had not duly earned his money by dusting their jackets
daily. Let it be said at once that he did most conscientiously
earn his money, and seldom overlooked any of his pupils even for a
day.

Back at the Grannoch bridge, under the parapet, Allan Welsh, the
minister of the Kirk of the Marrow, found the white packet lying
which Winsome had tied with such care. He looked all round to see
whence it had come. Then taking it in his hand, he looked at it a
long time silently, and with a strange and not unkindly expression
on his face. He lifted it to his lips and kissed the handwriting
which addressed it to Master Ralph Peden. As he paced away he
carefully put it in the inner pocket of his coat. Then, with his
head farther forward than ever, and the immanence of his great
brow overshadowing his ascetic face, he set himself slowly to
climb the brae.





CHAPTER XII.

MIDSUMMER DAWN.


True love is at once chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out
into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured
night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along
the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful
gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and
back-waters of the air, which twirled the fallen petals of the
pear and cherry blossoms in the little manse orchard.

As he stepped out upon the moor and the chill of dawn struck
inward, he did not know that Allan Welsh was watching him from his
blindless bedroom. Dawn is the testing-time of the universe. Its
cool, solvent atmosphere dissolves social amenities. It is
difficult to be courteous, impossible to be polite, in that hour
before the heart has realized that its easy task of throwing the
blood horizontally to brain and feet has to be exchanged for the
harder one of throwing it vertically to the extremities.

Ralph walked slowly and in deep thought through the long avenues
of glimmering beeches and under the dry rustle of the quivering
poplars. Then, as the first red of dawn touched his face, he
looked about him. He was clear of the trees now, and the broad
open expanse of the green fields and shining water meadows that
ring in Loch Grannoch widened out before him. The winds sighed and
rumbled about the hill-tops of the Orchar and the Black Laggan,
but in the valley only the cool moist wind of dawn drew largely
and statedly to and fro.

Ralph loved Nature instinctively, and saw it as a townbred lad
rarely does. He was deeply read in the more scientific literature
of the subject, and had spent many days in his Majesty's botanic
gardens, which lie above the broad breast of the Forth. He now
proved his learning, and with quick, sure eye made it real on the
Galloway hills. Every leaf spoke to him. He could lie for half a
day and learn wisdom from the ant. He took in the bird's song and
the moth's flight. The keepers sometimes wondered at the lights
which flashed here and there about the plantations, when in the
coolness of a moist evening he went out to entrap the sidelong-
dashing flutterers with his sugar-pots.

But since he came to Galloway, and especially since he smelled the
smell of the wood-fire set for the blanket-washing above the Crae
Water bridge, there were new secrets open to him. He possessed a
voice that could wile a bird off a bought. His inner sympathy with
wild and tame beasts alike was such that as he moved quietly among
a drowsing, cud-chewing herd on the braes of Urioch not a beast
moved.

Among them a wild, untamed colt stood at bay, its tail arched with
apprehension, yet sweeping the ground, and watched him with
flashing eyes of suspicion. Ralph held out his hand slowly, more
as if it were growing out of his side by some rapid natural
process than as if he were extending it. He uttered a low
"sussurrus" of coaxing and invitation, all the while imperceptibly
decreasing his distance from the colt. The animal threw back its
head, tossed its mane in act to flee, thought better of it and
dropped its nose to take a bite or two of the long coarse grass.
Then again it looked up and continued to gaze, fascinated at the
beckoning and caressing fingers. At last, with a little whinny of
pleasure, the colt, wholly reassured, came up and nestled a wet
nose against Ralph's coat. He took the wild thing's neck within
the arch of his arm, and the two new friends stood awhile in grave
converse.

A moment afterwards Ralph bent to lay a hand upon the head of one
of the placid queys [Footnote: Young--cows.] that had watched the
courtship with full, dewy eyes of bovine unconcern. Instantly the
colt charged into the still group with a wild flourish of hoofs
and viciously snapping teeth, scattering the black-polled
Galloways like smoke. Then, as if to reproach Ralph for his
unfaithfulness, he made a circle of the field at a full, swinging
gallop, sending the short turf flying from his unshod hoofs at
every stride. Back he came again, a vision of floating mane and
streaming tail, and stopped dead three yards from Ralph, his
forelegs strained and taut, ploughing furrows in the grass. As
Ralph moved quietly across the field the colt followed, pushing a
cool moist nose over the young man's shoulder. When at last Ralph
set a foot on the projecting stone which stood out from the side
of the grey, lichen-clad stone dyke, the colt stood stretching an
eager head over as though desirous of following him; then, with a
whinny of disappointment, he rushed round the field, charging at
the vaguely wondering and listlessly grazing cattle with head
arched between his forelegs and a flourish of widely distributed
heels.

Over the hill, Craig Ronald was still wrapped in the lucid
impermanence of earliest dawn, when Winsome Charteris set her foot
over the blue flag-stones of the threshold. The high tide of
darkness, which, in these northern summer mornings never rose very
high or lasted very long, had ebbed long ago. The indigo grey of
the sky was receding, and tinging towards the east with an
imperceptibly graded lavender which merged behind the long shaggy
outline of the piny ridge into a wash of pale lemon yellow.

The world paused, finger on lip, saying "Hush!" to Winsome as she
stepped over the threshold from the serenely breathing morning
air, from the illimitable sky which ran farther and farther back
as the angels drew the blinds from the windows of heaven.

"Hush!" said the cows over the hedge, blowing fragrant breaths of
approval from their wide, comma-shaped nostrils upon the lush
grass and upon the short heads of white clover, as they stood face
to the brae, all with their heads upward, eating their way like an
army on the march.

"Hush! hush!" said the sheep who were straggling over the shorter
grass of the High Park, feeding fitfully in their short, uneasy
way--crop, crop, crop--and then a pause, to move forward their own
length and begin all over again.

But the sheep and the kine, the dewy grass and the brightening
sky, might every one have spared their pains, for it was in no
wise in the heart of Winsome Charteris to make a noise amid the
silences of dawn. Meg Kissock, who still lay snug by Jess in a
plump-cheeked country sleep, made noise enough to stir the country
side when, rising, she set briskly about to get the house on its
morning legs. But Winsome was one of the few people in this world
--few but happy--to whom a sunrise is more precious than a sun set
--rarer and more calming, instinct with message and sign from a
covenant-keeping God. Also, Winsome betook her self early to bed,
and so awoke attuned to the sun's rising.

What drew her forth so early this June day was no thought or hope
or plan except the desire to read the heart of Nature, and perhaps
that she might not be left too long alone with the parable of her
own heart. A girl's heart is full of thought which it dares not
express to herself--of fluttering and trembling possibilities,
chrysalis-like, set aside to await the warmth of an unrevealed
summer. In Winsome's soul the first flushing glory of the May of
youth was waking the prisoned life. But there were throbs and
thrillings too piercingly sweet to last undeveloped in her soul.
The bursting bud of her healthful beauty, quickened by the shy
radiance of her soul, shook the centres of her life, even as a
laburnum-tree mysteriously quivers when the golden rain is in act
to break from the close-clustered dependent budlets.

Thus it was that, at the stile which helps the paths be tween the
Dullarg and Craig Ronald to overleap the high hill dyke, Ralph met
Winsome. As they looked into one another's eyes, they saw Nature
suddenly dissolve into confused meaninglessness. There was no
clear message for either of them there, save the message that the
old world of their hopes and fears had wholly passed away. Yet no
new world had come when over the hill dyke their hands met. They
said no word. There is no form of greeting for such. Eve did not
greet Adam in polite phrase when he awoke to find her in the dawn
of one Eden day, a helpmeet meet for him. Neither did Eve reply
that "it was a fine morn ing." It is always a fine morning in
Eden. They were silent, and so were these two. Their hands lay
within one another a single instant. Then, with a sense of
something wanting, Ralph sprang lightly over the dyke as an Edin
burgh High-School boy ought who had often played hares and hounds
in the Hunter's Bog, and been duly thrashed therefor by Dr. Adam
[Footnote: The Aery famous master of the High School of
Edinburgh.] on the following morning.

When Ralph stood beside her upon the sunny side of the stile he
instinctively resumed Winsome's hand. For this he had no reason,
certainly no excuse. Still, it may be urged in excuse that it was
as much as an hour or an hour and a half before Winsome remembered
that he needed any. Our most correct and ordered thoughts have a
way of coming to us belated, as the passenger who strolls in
confidently ten minutes after the platform is clear. But, like
him, they are at least ready for the next train.

As Winsome and Ralph turned towards the east, the sun set his face
over the great Scotch firs on the ridge, whose tops stood out like
poised irregular blots on the fire centred ocean of light.

It was the new day, and if the new world had not come with it, of
a surety it was well on the way.





CHAPTER XIII.

A STRING OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET.


For a long time they were silent, though it was not long before
Winsome drew away her hand, which, however, continued to burn
consciously for an hour afterwards. Silence settled around them.
The constraint of speech fell first upon Ralph, being town-bred
and accustomed to the convenances at Professor Thriepneuk's.

"You rise early," he said, glancing shyly down at Winsome, who
seemed to have forgotten his presence. He did not wish her to
forget. He had no objection to her dreaming, if only she would
dream about him.

Winsome turned the bewildering calmness of her eyes upon him. A
gentleman, they say, is calm-eyed. So is a cow. But in the eye of
a good woman there is a peace which comes from many generations of
mothers--who, every one Christs in their way, have suffered their
heavier share of the Eden curse.

Ralph would have given all that he possessed--which, by the way,
was not a great deal--to be able to assure himself that there was
any hesitancy or bashfulness in the glance which met his own. But
Winsome's eyes were as clearly and frankly blue as if God had made
them new that morning. At least Ralph looked upon their Sabbath
peace and gave thanks, finding them very good.

A sparkle of laughter, at first silent and far away, sprang into
them, like a breeze coming down Loch Grannoch when it lies asleep
in the sun, sending shining sparkles winking shoreward, and
causing the wavering golden lights on the shallow sand of the bays
to scatter tremulously. So in the depths of Winsome's eyes
glimmered the coming smile. Winsome could be divinely serious, but
behind there lay the possibility and certainty of very frank
earthly laughter. If, as Ralph thought, not for the first time in
this rough island story, this girl were an angel, surely she was
one to whom her Maker had given that rarest gift given to woman--
a well-balanced sense of humour.

So when Ralph said, hardly knowing what he said, "You rise early,"
it was with that far-away intention of a smile that Winsome
replied:

"And you, sir, have surely not lagged in bed, or else you have
come here in a great hurry."

"I rose," returned Ralph, "certainly betimes--in fact, a great
while before day; it is the time when one can best know one's
self."

The sententiousness, natural to his years and education, to some
extent rebuked Winsome, who said more soberly:

"Perhaps you have again lost your books of study?"

"I do not always study in books," answered Ralph.

Winsome continued to look at him as though waiting his
explanation.

"I mean," said Ralph, quickly, his pale cheek touched with red,
"that though I am town-bred I love the things that wander among
the flowers and in the wood. There are the birds, too, and the
little green plants that have no flow ers, and they all have a
message, if I could only hear it and understand it."

The sparkle in Winsome's eyes quieted into calm.

"I too--" she began, and paused as if startled at what she was
about to say. She went on: "I never heard any one say things like
these. I did not know that any one else had thoughts like these
except myself."

"And have you thought these things?" said Ralph, with a quick joy
in his heart.

"Yes," replied Winsome, looking down on the ground and playing
with the loose string of the lilac sunbonnet. "I used often to
wonder how it was that I could not look on the loch on Sabbath
morning without feeling like crying. It was often better to look
upon it than to go to Maister Welsh's kirk. But I ought not to say
these things to you," she said, with a quick thought of his
profession.

Ralph smiled. There were few things that Winsome Charteris might
not say to him. He too had his experiences to collate.

"Have you ever stood on a hill-top as though you were suspended in
the air, and when you seem to feel the earth whirling away from
beneath you, rushing swiftly eastward towards the sunrise?"

"I have heard it," said Winsome unexpectedly.

"Heard it?" queried Ralph, with doubt in his voice.

"Yes," said Winsome calmly, "I have often heard the earth wheeling
round on still nights out on the top of the Craigs, where there
was no sound, and all the house was asleep. It is as if some Great
One were saying 'Hush!' to the angels--I think God himself!"

These were not the opinions of the kirk of the Marrow; neither
were they expressed in the Acts Declaratory or the protests or
claims of right made by the faithful contending remnant. But Ralph
would not at that moment have hesitated to add them to the
Westminster Confession.

It is a wonderful thing to be young. It is marvellously delightful
to be young and a poet as well, who has just fallen--nay, rather,
plunged fathoms--deep in love. Ralph Peden was both. He stood
watching Winsome Charteris, who looked past him into a distance
moistly washed with tender ultramarine ash, like her own eyes too
full of colour to be gray and too pearly clear to be blue.

An equal blowing wind drew up the loch which lay be neath flooded
with morning light, the sun basking on its broad expanse, and
glittering in a myriad sparkles on the, narrows beneath them
beside which the blanket-washing had been. A frolicsome breeze
blew down the hill towards them in little flicks and eddies. One
of these drew a flossy tendril of Winsome's golden hair, which
this morning had red lights in it like the garnet gloss on ripe
wheat or Indian corn, and tossed it over her brow. Ralph's hand
tingled with the desire to touch it and put it back under her
bonnet, and his heart leaped at the thought. But though he did not
stir, nor had any part of his being moved save the hidden thought
of his heart, he seemed to fall in his own estimation as one who
had attempted a sacrilege.

"Have you ever noticed," continued Winsome, all unconscious, going
on with that fruitful comparison of feelings which has woven so
many gossamer threads into three-fold cords, "how everything in
the fields and the woods is tamer in the morning? They seem to
have forgotten that man is their natural enemy while they slept."

"Perhaps," said Ralph theologically, "when they awake they forget
that they are not still in that old garden that Adam kept."

Winsome was looking at him now, for he had looked away in his
turn, lost in a poet's thought. It struck her for the first time
that other people might think him handsome. When a girl forgets to
think whether she herself is of this opinion, and begins to think
what others will think on a subject like this (which really does
not concern her at all), the proceedings in the case are not
finished.

They walked on together down by the sunny edge of the great
plantation. The sun was now rising well into the sky, climbing
directly upward as if on this midsummer day he were leading a
forlorn hope to scale the zenith of heaven. He shone on the russet
tassels of the larches, and the deep sienna boles of the Scotch
firs. The clouds, which rolled fleecy and white in piles and
crenulated bastions of cumulus, lighted the eyes of the man and
maid as they went onward upon the crisping piny carpet of fallen
fir-needles.

"I have never seen Nature so lovely," said Ralph, "as when the
bright morning breaks after a night of shower. Everything seems to
have been new bathed in freshness."

"As if Dame Nature had had her spring cleaning," answered Winsome,
"or Andrew Kissock when he has had his face washed once a week,"
who had been serious long enough, and who felt that too much
earnestness even in the study of Nature might be a dangerous
thing.

But the inner thought of each was something quite different. This
is what Ralph thought within his heart, though his words were also
perfectly genuine:

"There is a dimple on her chin which comes out when she smiles,"
so he wanted her to smile again. When she did so, she was lovely
enough to peril the Faith or even the denomination.

Ralph tried to recollect if there were no more stiles on this hill
path over which she might have to be helped. He had taken off his
hat and walked beside her bareheaded, carrying his hat in the hand
farthest from Winsome, who was wondering how soon she would be
able to tell him that he must keep his shoulders back.

Winsome was not a young woman of great experience in these
matters, but she had the natural instinct for the possibilities of
love without which no woman comes into the world--at once armour
defensive and weapon offensive. She knew that one day Ralph Peden
would tell her that he loved her, but in the meantime it was so
very pleasant that it was a pity the days should come to an end.
So she resolved that they should not, at least not just yet. If
to-morrow be good, why confine one's self to to-day? She had not
yet faced the question of what she would say to him when the day
could be no longer postponed. She did not care to face it.
Sufficient unto the day is the good thereof, is quite as excellent
a precept as its counterpart, or at least so Winsome Charteris
thought. But, all the same, she wished that she could tell him to
keep his shoulders back.

A sudden resolve sprang full armed from her brain. Winsome had
that strange irresponsibility sometimes which comes irresistibly
to some men and women in youth, to say something as an experiment
which she well knew she ought not to say, simply to see what would
happen. More than once it had got her into trouble.

"I wish you would keep back your shoulders when you walk!" she
said, quick as a flash, stopping and turning sideways to face
Ralph Peden.

Ralph, walking thoughtfully with the student stoop, stood aghast,
as though not daring to reply lest his ears had not heard aright.

"I say, why do you not keep your shoulders back?" repeated Winsome
sharply, and with a kind of irritation at his silence.

He had no right to make her feel uncomfortable, whatever she might
say.

"I did not know--I thought--nobody ever told me," said Ralph,
stammering and catching at the word which came uppermost, as he
had done in college when Professor Thriepneuk, who was as fierce
in the class-room as he was mild at home, had him cornered upon a
quantity.

"Well, then," said Winsome, "if every one is so blind, it is time
that some one did tell you now."

Ralph squared himself like a drill-sergeant, holding himself so
straight that Winsome laughed outright, and that so merrily that
Ralph laughed too, well content that the dimple on her cheek
should play at hide and seek with the pink flush of her clear
skin.

So they had come to the stile, and Ralph's heart beat stronger,
and a nervous tension of expectation quivered through him,
bewildering his judgment. But Winsome was very clear-headed, and
though the white of her eyes was as dewy and clear as a child's,
she was no simpleton. She had read many men and women in her time,
for it is the same in essence to rule Craig Ronald as to rule
Rome.

"This is your way," she said, sitting down on the stile. "I am
going up to John Scott's to see about the lambs. It will be
breakfast-time at the manse before you got back."

Ralph's castle fell to the ground.

"I will come up with you to John Scott's," he said with an
undertone of eagerness.

"Indeed, that you will not," said Winsome promptly, who did not
want to arrive at seven o'clock in the morning at John Scott's
with any young man. "You will go home and take to your book, after
you have changed your shoes and stockings," she said practically.

"Well, then, let me bid you good-bye, Winsome!" said Ralph.

Her heart was warm to hear him say Winsome--for the first time. It
certainly was not unpleasant, and there was no need that she
should quarrel about that. She was about to give him her hand,
when she saw something in his eye.

"Mind, you are not to kiss it as you did grannie's yesterday;
besides, there are John Scott's dogs on the brow of the hill," she
said, pointing upward.

Poor Ralph could only look more crestfallen still. Such knowledge
was too high for him. He fell back on his old formula:

"I said before that you are a witch--"

"And you say it again?" queried Winsome, with careless
nonchalance, swinging her bonnet by its strings. "Well, you can
come back and kiss grannie's hand some other day. You are
something of a favourite with her."

But she had presumed just a hair-breadth too far on Ralph's
gentleness. He snatched the lilac sunbonnet out of her hands,
tearing, in his haste, one of the strings off, and leaving it in
Winsome's hand. Then he kissed it once and twice outside where the
sun shone on it, and inside where it had rested on her head. "You
have torn it," she said complainlngly, yet without anger.

"I am very glad," said Ralph Peden, coming nearer to her with a
light in his eye that she had never seen before.

Winsome dropped the string, snatched up the bonnet, and fled up
the hill as trippingly as a young doe towards the herd's cottage.
At the top of the fell she paused a moment with her hand on her
side, as if out of breath. Ralph Peden was still holding the torn
bonnet-string in his hand.

He held it up, hanging loose like a pennon from his hand. She
could hear the words come clear up the hill:

"I'm very--glad--that--I--tore--it, and I will come and--see--
your--grandmother!"

"Of all the--" Winsome stopped for want of words, speaking to
herself as she turned away up the hill--"of all the insolent and
disagreeable--"

She did not finish her sentence, as she adjusted the outraged
sunbonnet on her curls, tucking the remaining string carefully
within the crown; but as she turned again to look, Ralph Peden was
calmly folding tip the string and putting it in a book.

"I shall never speak to him again as long as I live," she said,
compressing her lips so that a dimple that Ralph had never seen
came out on the other side. This, of course, closed the record in
the case. Yet in a little while she added thoughtfully: "But he is
very handsome, and I think he will keep his shoulders back now.
Not, of course, that it matters, for I am never to speak to him
any more!"

John Scott's dogs were by this time leaping upon her, and that
worthy shepherd was coming along a steep slope upon the edges of
his boot-soles in the miraculous manner, which is peculiar to
herds, as if he were walking on the turnpike.

Winsome turned for the last time. Against the broad, dark sapphire
expanse of the loch, just where the great march dyke stepped off
to bathe in the summer water, she saw something black which waved
a hand and sprang over lightly.

Winsome sighed, and said a little wistfully yet not sadly:

"Who would have thought it of him? It just shows!" she said. All
which is a warning to maids that the meekest worm may turn.





CHAPTER XIV.

CAPTAIN AGNEW GREATORIX.


Greatorix Castle sat mightily upon a hill. It could not be hid,
and it looked down superciliously upon the little squiredom of
Craig Ronald, as well as upon farms and cottages a many. In days
not so long gone by, Greatorix Castle had been the hold of the
wearers of the White Cockade, rough riders after Lag and Sir James
Dalzyell, and rebels after that, who had held with Derwentwater
and the prince. Now there was quiet there. Only the Lady Elizabeth
and her son Agnew Greatorix dwelt there, and the farmer's cow and
the cottager's pig grazed and rooted unharmed--not always,
however, it was whispered, the farmer's daughter, for of all
serfdoms the droit du seignior is the last to die. Still,
Greatorix Castle was a notable place, high set on its hill, shires
and towns beneath, the blue breath of peat reek blowing athwart
the plain beneath and rising like an incense about.

Here the Lady Elizabeth dwelt in solemn but greatly reduced state.
She was a woman devoted to the practice of holiness according to
the way of the priest. It was the whole wish of her life that she
might keep a spiritual director, instead of having Father Mahon to
ride over from Dumfries once a month.

Within the castle there were many signs of decay--none of
rehabilitation. The carpets were worn into holes where feet had
oftenest fallen, and the few servants dared not take them out to
be beaten in the due season of the year, for indubitably they
would fall to pieces. So the curtains hung till an unwary stranger
would rest upon them with a hand's weight. Then that hand plucked
a palmbreadth away of the rotten and moth-eaten fabric.

There was an aged housekeeper at Greatorix Castle, who dwelt in
the next room to the Lady Elizabeth, and was supposed to act as
her maid. Mistress Humbie, however, was an exacting person; and
being an aged woman, and her infirmities bearing upon her, she
considered it more fitting that the Lady Elizabeth should wait
upon her. This, for the good of her soul, the Lady Elizabeth did.
Two maids and a boy, a demon boy, in buttons, who dwelt below-
stairs and gave his time to the killing of rats with ingenious
catapults and crossbows, completed the household--except Agnew
Greatorix.

The exception was a notable one. Save in the matter of fortune,
Nature had not dealt unhandsomely with Agnew Greatorix; yet just
because of this his chances of growing up into a strong and useful
man were few. He had been nurtured upon expectations from his
earliest youth. His uncle Agnew, the Lady Elizabeth's childless
brother, who for the sake of the favour of a strongly Protestant
aunt had left the mother church of the Greatorix family, had been
expected to do something for Agnew; but up to this present time he
had received only his name from him, in lieu of all the stately
heritages of Holywood in the Nith Valley hard by Lincluden, and
Stennesholm in Carrick.

So Agnew Greatorix had grown up in the midst of raw youths who
were not his peers in position. He companied with them till his
mother pointed out that it was not for a Greatorix to drink in the
Blue Bell and at the George with the sons of wealthy farmers and
bonnet lairds. By dint of scraping and saving which took a long
time, and influence which, costing nothing, took for a Greatorix
no time at all, the Lady Elizabeth obtained for her son a
commission in the county yeomanry. There he was thrown with
Maxwells of the Braes, Herons from the Shireside, and Gordons from
the northern straths--all young men of means and figure in the
county. Into the midst of these Agnew took his tightly knit
athletic figure, his small firmly set head and full-blooded dark
face--the only faults of which were that the eyes were too closely
set together and shuttered with lids that would not open more than
half way, and that he possessed the sensual mouth of a man who has
never willingly submitted to a restraint. Agnew Greatorix could
not compete with his companions, but he cut them out as a squire
of dames, and came home with a dangerous and fascinating
reputation, the best-hated man in the corps.

So when Captain Agnew clattered through the village in clean-cut
scarlet and clinking spurs, all the maids ran to the door, except
only a few who had once run like the others but now ran no more.
The captain came often to Craig Ronald. It was upon his way to
kirk and market, for the captain for the good of his soul went
occasionally to the little chapel of the Permission at Dumfries.
Still oftener he came with the books which the Lady Elizabeth
obtained from Edinburgh, the reading of which she shared with
Mistress Walter Skirving, whose kinship with the Lochinvars she
did not forget, though her father had been of the moorland branch
of that honourable house, and she herself had disgraced her
ancient name by marrying with a psalm-singing bonnet laird. But
the inexplicability of saying whom a woman may not take it into
her head to marry was no barrier to the friendship of the Lady
Elizabeth, who kept all her religion for her own consumption and
did not even trouble her son with it--which was a great pity, for
he indeed had much need, though small desire, thereof.

On the contrary, it was a mark of good blood sometimes to follow
one's own fancy. The Lady Elizabeth had done that herself against
the advice of the countess her mother, and that was the reason why
she dwelt amid hangings that came away in handfuls, and was
waiting-maid to Mistress Humbie her own housekeeper.

Agnew Greatorix had an eye for a pretty face, or rather for every
pretty face. Indeed, he had nothing else to do, except clean his
spurs and ride to the market town. So, since the author of
Waverley began to write his inimitable fictions, and his mother to
divide her time between works of devotion and the adventures of
Ivanhoe and Nigel, Agnew Greatorix had made many pilgrimages to
Craig Ronald. Here the advent of the captain was much talked over
by the maids, and even anticipated by Winsome herself as a
picturesque break in the monotony of the staid country life.
Certainly he brought the essence of strength and youth and
athletic energy into the quiet court-yard, when he rode in on his
showily paced horse and reined him round at the low steps of the
front door, with the free handling and cavalry swing which he had
inherited as much from the long line of Greatorixes who had ridden
out to harry the Warden's men along the marches, as from the
yeomanry riding-master.

Now, the captain was neither an obliging nor yet a particularly
amiable young man, and when he took so kindly to fetching and
carrying, it was not long before the broad world of farm towns and
herds' cot-houses upon which Greatorix Castle looked down
suspected a motive, and said so in its own way.

On one occasion, riding down the long loaning of Craig Ronald, the
captain came upon the slight, ascetic figure of Allan Welsh, the
Marrow minister, leaning upon the gate which closed the loaning
from the road. The minister observed him, but showed no signs of
moving. Agnew Greatorix checked his horse.

"Would you open the gate and allow me to pass on my way?" he said,
with chill politeness. The minister of the Marrow kirk looked
keenly at him from under his grey eyebrows.

"After I have had a few words with you, young sir," said Mr.
Welsh.

"I desire no words with you," returned the young man impatiently,
backing his horse.

"For whom are your visits at Craig Ronald intended?" said the
minister calmly. "Walter Skirving and his spouse do not receive
company of such dignity; and besides them there are only the maids
that I know of."

"Who made you my father confessor?" mocked Agnew Greatorix, with
an unpleasant sneer on his handsome face.

"The right of being minister in the things of the Spirit to all
that dwell in Craig Ronald House," said the minister of the Marrow
firmly.

"Truly a pleasant ministry, and one, no doubt, requiring frequent
ministrations; yet do I not remember to have met you at Craig
Ronald," he continued. "So faithful a minister surely must be
faithful in his spiritual attentions."

He urged his horse to the side of the gate and leaned over to open
the gate himself, but the minister had his hand firmly on the
latch.

"I have seen you ride to many maids' houses, Agnew Greatorix,
since the day your honoured father died, but never a one have I
seen the better of your visits. Woe and sorrow have attended upon
your way. You may ride off now at your ease, but beware the
vengeance of the God of Jacob; the mother's curse and the father's
malison ride not far behind!"

"Preach me no preachments," said the young man; "keep such for
your Marrow folk on Sundays; you but waste your words."

"Then I beseech you by the memory of a good father, whom, though
of another and an alien communion, I shall ever respect, to cast
your eyes elsewhere, and let the one ewe lamb of those whom God
hath stricken alone."

The gate was open now, and as he came through, Agnew Greatorix
made his horse curvet, pushing the frail form of the preacher
almost into the hedge.

"If you would like to come and visit us up at the castle," he said
mockingly, "I dare say we could yet receive you as my forefathers,
of whom you are so fond, used to welcome your kind. I saw the
thumbikins the other day; and I dare say we could fit you with
your size in boots."

"The Lord shall pull down the mighty from their seats, and exalt
them that are of low estate!" said the preacher solemnly.

"Very likely," said the young man as he rode away.





CHAPTER XV.

ON THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD.


But Agnew Greatorix came as often as ever to Craig Ronald.
Generally he found Winsome busy with her household affairs,
sometimes with her sleeves buckled above her elbows, rolling the
tough dough for the crumpy farles of the oat-cake, and scattering
handfuls of dry meal over it with deft fingers to bring the mass
to its proper consistency for rolling out upon the bake-board.
Leaving his horse tethered to the great dismounting stone at the
angle of the kitchen (a granite boulder or "travelled stone," as
they said thereabouts), with an iron ring into it, he entered and
sat down to watch. Sometimes, as to-day, he would be only silent
and watchful; but he never failed to compass Winsome with the
compliment of humility and observance. It is possible that better
things were stirring in his heart than usually brought him to such
places. There is no doubt, indeed, that he appreciated the
frankness and plain speech which he received from the very
practical young mistress of Craig Ronald.

When he left the house it was Agnew Greatorix's invariable custom
to skirt the edge of the orchard before mounting. Just in the dusk
of the great oak-tree, where its branches mingle with those of the
gean [wild cherry], he was met by the slim, lithe figure of Jess
Kissock, in whose piquant elvishness some strain of Romany blood
showed itself.

Jess had been waiting for him ever since he had taken his hat in
his hand to leave the house. As he came in sight of the watcher,
Agnew Greatorix stopped, and Jess came closer to him, motioning
him imperiously to bring his horse close in to the shadow of the
orchard wall. Agnew did so, putting out his arm as if he would
kiss her; but, with a quick fierce movement, Jess thrust his hand
away.

"I have told you before not to play these tricks with me--keep
them for them that ye come to Craig Ronald to see. It's the
mistress ye want. What need a gentleman like you meddle with the
maid?"

"Impossible as it may seem, the like has been done," said Agnew,
smiling down at the black eyes and blowing elf locks.

"Not with this maid," replied Jess succinctly, and in deed slhe
looked exceedingly able to take care of herself, as became Meg
Kissock's sister.

"I'll go no further with Winsome," said Greatorix gloomily,
breaking the silence. "You said that if I consulted her about the
well-being of the poor rats over at the huts, and took her advice
about the new cottages for the foresters, she would listen to me.
Well, she did listen, but as soon as I hinted at any other
subject, I might as well have been talking to the old daisy in the
sitting-room with the white band round her head."

"Did anybody ever see the like of you menfolk?" cried Jess,
throwing up her hands hopelessly; "d'ye think that a bonny lass is
just like a black ripe cherry on a bough, ready to drap into your
mooth when it pleases your high mightinesses to hold it open?"

"Has Winsome charteris any sweetheart?" asked the captain.

"What for wad she be doing with a sweetheart? She has muckle else
to think on. There's a young man that's baith braw an' bonny, a
great scholar frae Enbra' toon that comes gye an' aften frae the
manse o' Dullarg, whaur he's bidin' a' the simmer for the
learnin'. He comes whiles, an' Winsome kind o' gies him a bit
convoy up the hill."

"Jess Kissock," said the young man passionately, "tell me no lies,
or--"

"Nane o' yer ill tongue for me, young man; keep it for yer mither.
I'm little feared o' ye or ony like ye. Ye'll maybe get a bit dab
frae the neb o' a jockteleg [point of a sheath-knife] that will
yeuk [tickle] ye for a day or twa gin ye dinna learn an' that
speedily, as Maister Welsh wad say, to keep yer Han's aff my
faither's dochter." Jess's good Scots was infinitely better and
more vigorous than the English of the lady's maid.

"I beg your pardon, Jess. I am a passionate, hasty man. I am sure
I meant no harm. Tell me more of this hulking landlouper
[intruder], and I'll give you a kiss."

"Keep yer kisses for them that likes them. The young man's no
landlouper ony mair nor yersel'--no as mickle indeed, but a very
proper young man, wi' a face as bonny as an angel--"

"But, Jess, do you mean to say that you are going to help him with
Winsome?" asked the young man.

"Feint a bit!" answered the young woman frankly. "She'll no get
him gin I can help it. I saw him first and bid him guid-day afore
ever she set her een on him. It's ilka yin for hersel' when it
comes to a braw young man," and Jess tossed her gipsy head, and
pouted a pair of handsome scarlet lips.

Greatorix laughed. "The land lies that way, does it?" he said.
"Then that's why you would not give me a kiss to-day, Jess," he
went on; "the black coat has routed the red baith but an' ben--but
we'll see. You cannot both have him, Jess, and if you are so very
fond of the parson, ye'll maybe help me to keep Winsome Charteris
to myself."

"Wad ye mairry her gin ye had the chance, Agnew Greatorix?"

"Certainly; what else?" replied the young man promptly.

"Then ye shall hae her," replied Jess, as if Winsome were within
her deed of gift,

"And you'll try for the student, Jess?" asked the young man. "I
suppose he would not need to ask twice for a kiss?"

"Na, for I would kiss him withoot askin'--that is, gin he hadna
the sense to kiss ME," said Jess frankly.

"Well," said Greatorix, somewhat reluctantly, "I'm sure I wish you
joy of your parson. I see now what the canting old hound from the
Dullarg Manse meant when he tackled me at the loaning foot. He
wanted Winsome for the young whelp."

"I dinna think that," replied Jess; "he disna want him to come
aboot here ony mair nor you."

"How do you know that, Jess?"

"Ou, I juist ken."

"Can you find out what Winsome thinks herself?"

"I can that, though she hasna a word to say to me--that am far
mair deservin' o' confidence than that muckle peony faced hempie,
Meg, that an ill Providence gied me for a sis ter. Her keep a
secret?--the wind wad waft it oot o' her." Thus affectionately
Jess.

"But how can you find out, then?" persisted the young man, yet
unsatisfied.

"Ou fine that," said Jess. "Meg talks in her sleep."

Before Agnew Greatorix leaped on to his horse, which all this time
had stood quiet on his bridle-arm, only occasion ally jerking his
head as if to ask his master to come away, he took the kiss he had
been denied, and rode away laugh ing, but with one cheek much
redder than the other, the mark of Jess's vengeance.

"Ye hae ower muckle conceit an' ower little sense ever to be a
richt blackguard," said Jess as he went, "but ye hae the richt
intention for the deil's wark. Ye'll do the young mistress nae
hurt, for she wad never look twice at ye, but I cannot let her get
the bonny lad frae Embra'-na, I saw him first, an' first come
first served!"

"Where have you been so long," asked her mistress, as she came in.

"Juist drivin' a gilravagin' muckle swine oot o' the or chard!"
replied Jess with some force and truth.





CHAPTER XVI.

THE CUIF BEFORE THE SESSION.


"Called, nominate, summoned to appear, upon this third citation,
Alexander Mowdiewort, or Moldieward, to answer for the sin of
misca'in' the minister and session o' this parish, and to show
cause why he, as a sectary notour, should not demit, depone, and
resign his office of grave digger in the kirk-yard of this parish
with all the emoluments, benefits, and profits thereto
appertaining.--Officer, call Alexander Mowdiewort!"

Thus Jacob Kittle, schoolmaster and session clerk of the parish of
Dullarg, when in the kirk itself that reverent though not revered
body was met in full convocation. There was presiding the Rev.
Erasmus Teends himself, the minister of the parish, looking like a
turkey-cock with a crumpled white neckcloth for wattles. He was
known in the parish as Mess John, and was full of dignified
discourse and excellent taste in the good cheer of the farmers. He
was a judge of nowt [cattle], and a connoisseur of black puddings,
which he considered to require some Isle of Man brandy to bring
out their own proper flavour.

"Alexander Moldieward, Alexander Moldieward!" cried old Snuffy
Callum, the parish beadle, going to the door. Then in a lower
tone, "Come an' answer for't, Saunders."

Mowdiewort and a large-boned, grim-faced old woman of fifty-five
were close beside the door, but Christie cried past them as if the
summoned persons were at the top of the Dullarg Hill at the
nearest, and also as if he had not just risen from a long and
confidential talk with them.

It was within the black interior of the old kirk that the session
met, in the yard of which Saunders Mowdiewort had dug so many
graves, and now was to dig no more, unless he appeased the ire of
the minister and his elders for an offence against the majesty of
their court and moderator.

"Alexander Moldieward!" again cried the old "betheral," very loud,
to some one on the top of the Dullarg Hill--then in an ordinary
voice, "come awa', Saunders man, you and your mither, an' dinna
keep them waitin'--they're no chancy when they're keepit."

Saunders and his mother entered.

"Here I am, guid sirs, an' you Mess John," said the grave-digger
very respectfully, "an' my mither to answer for me, an' guid een
to ye a'."

"Come awa', Mistress Mowdiewort," said the minister. "Ye hae aye
been a guid member in full communion. Ye never gaed to a prayer-
meetin' or Whig conventicle in yer life. It's a sad peety that ye
couldna keep your flesh an' bluid frae companyin' an' covenantin'
wi' them that lichtly speak o' the kirk."

"'Deed, minister, we canna help oor bairns--an' 'deed ye can speak
till himsel'. He is of age--ask him! But gin ye begin to be ower
sair on the callant, I'se e'en hae to tak' up the cudgels mysel'."

With this, Mistress Mowdiewort put her hands to the strings of her
mutch, to feel that she had not unsettled them; then she stood
with arms akimbo and her chest well forward like a grenadier, as
if daring the session to do its worst.

"I have a word with you," said Mess John, lowering at her; "it is
told to me that yon keepit your son back from answering the
session when it was his bounden duty to appear on the first
summons. Indeed, it is only on a warrant for blasphemy and the
threat of deprivation of his liveli hood that he has come to-day.
What have you to say that he should not be deprived and also
declarit excommunicate?"

"Weel, savin' yer presence, Mess John," said Mistress Mowdiewort,
"ye see the way o't is this: Saunders, my son, is a blate [shy]
man, an' he canna weel speak for him sel'. I thought that by this
time the craiter micht hae gotten a wife again that could hae
spoken for him, an' had he been worth the weight o' a bumbee's
hind leg he wad hae had her or this--an' a better yin nor the last
he got. Aye, but a sair trouble she was to me; she had juist yae
faut, Saunders's first wife, an' that was she was nae use ava! But
it was a guid thing he was grave-digger, for he got her buriet for
naething, an' even the coffin was what ye micht ca' a second-hand
yin--though it had never been worn, which was a wunnerfu' thing.
Ye see the way o't was this: There was Creeshy Callum, the brither
o' yer doitit [stupid] auld betheral here, that canna tak' up the
buiks as they should (ye should see my Saunders tak' them up at
the Marrow kirk)--"

"Woman," said the minister, "we dinna want to hear--"

"Very likely no--but ye hae gien me permission to speak, an' her
that's stannin afore yer honourable coort, brawly kens the laws.
Elspeth Mowdiewort didna soop yer kirk an wait till yer session
meetings war ower for thirty year in my ain man's time withoot
kennin' a' the laws. A keyhole's a most amazin' convenient thing
by whiles, an' I was suppler in gettin' up aff my hunkers then
than at the present time."

"Silence, senseless woman!" said the session clerk.

"I'll silence nane, Jacob Kittle; silence yersel', for I ken
what's in the third volume o' the kirk records at the thirty
second page; an' gin ye dinna haud yer wheesht, dominie, ilka wife
in the pairish'll ken as weel as me. A bonny yin you to sit
cockin' there, an' to be learnin' a' the bairns their caritches
[catechism]."

The session let her go her way; her son meantime stood passing an
apologetic hand over his sleek hair, and making deprecatory
motions to the minister, when he thought that his mother was not
looking in his direction.

"Aye, I was speakin' aboot Creeshy Callum's coffin that oor
Saunders--the muckle tongueless sumph there got dirt cheap--ye see
Greeshy had been measured for't, but, as he had a short leg and a
shorter, the joiner measured the wrang leg--joiners are a' dottle
stupid bodies--an' whan the time cam' for Creeshy to be streekit,
man, he wadna fit--na, it maun hae been a sair disappointment
till him--that is to say--gin he war in the place whaur he could
think wi' ony content on his coffin, an' that, judgin' by his life
an' conversation, was far frae bein' a certainty."

"Mistress Mowdiewort, I hae aye respectit ye, an' we are a'
willin' to hear ye noo, if you have onything to say for your son,
but you must make no insinuations against any members of the
court, or I shall be compelled to call the officer to put you
out," said the minister, rising impressively with his hand
stretched towards Mistress Elspeth Mowdiewort.

But Elspeth Mowdiewort was far from being impressed.

"Pit me oot, Snuffy Oallum; pit me, Eppie Mowdiewort, oot! Na, na,
Snuffy's maybe no very wise, but he kens better nor that. Man,
Maister Teends, I hae kenned the hale root an' stock o' thae
Callums frae first to last; I hae dung Greeshy till he couldna
stand--him that had to be twice fitted for his coffin; an' Wull
that was hangit at Dumfries for sheep-stealin'; an' Meg that was
servant till yersel--aye, an' a bonny piece she was as ye ken
yersel'; an' this auld donnert carle that, when he carries up the
Bibles, ye can hear the rattlin' o' his banes, till it disturbs
the congregation--I hae dung them a' heeds ower heels in their
best days--an' to tell me at the hinner end that ye wad ca' in the
betheral to pit oot Elspeth Mowdiewort! Ye maun surely hae an
awsome ill wull at the puir auld craitur!"

"Mither," at last said Saunders, who was becoming anxious for his
grave-diggership, and did not wish to incense his judges further,
"I'm willin' to confess that I had a drap ower muckle the ither
night when I met in wi' the minister an' the dominie; but, gin I
confess it, ye'll no gar me sit on the muckle black stool i'
repentance afore a' the fowk, an' me carries up the buiks i' the
Marrow kirk."

"Alexander Mowdiewort, ye spak ill o' the minister an' session, o'
the kirk an' the wholesome order o' this parish. We have a warrant
for your apprehension and appearance which we might, unless moved
by penitence and dutiful submission, put in force. Then are ye
aware whaur that wad land you--i' the jail in Kirkcudbright toon,
my man Saunders."

But still it was the dread disgrace of the stool of repentance
that bulked most largely in the culprit's imagination.

"Na, na," interjected Mistress Mowdiewort, "nae siccan things for
ony bairns o' mine. Nae son o' mine sall ever set his hurdies on
the like o't."

"Be silent, woman!" said the minister severely; "them that will to
black stool maun to black stool. Rebukit an' chastised is the law
an' order, and rebukit and chastised shall your son be as weel as
ithers."

"'Deed, yer nae sae fond o' rebukin' the great an' the rich.
There's that young speldron frae the castle; its weel kenned what
he is, an' hoo muckle he's gotten the weight o'."

"He is not of our communion, and not subject to our discipline,"
began the minister.

"Weel," said Elspeth, "weel, let him alane. He's a Pape, an' gaun
to purgatory at ony gate. But then there's bletherin' Johnnie o'
the Dinnance Mains--he's as fu' as Solway tide ilka Wednesday, an'
no only speaks agin minister an' session, as maybe my Saunders did
(an' maybe no), but abuses Providence, an the bellman, an' even
blasphemes agin the fast day--yet I never heard that ye had him
cockit up on the black henbauks i' the kirk. But then he's a braw
man an' keeps a gig!"

"The law o' the kirk is no respecter of persons," said Mess John.

"No, unless they are heritors," said Cochrane of the Holm, who had
a pew with the name of his holding painted on it.

"Or members o' session," said sleeky Carment of the Kirkland, who
had twice escaped the stool of repentance on the ground that, as
he urged upon the body, "gleds [hawks] shouldna pike gleds een
oot."

"Or parish dominies," said the session clerk, to give solidarity
to his own position.

"Weel, I ken juist this if nae mair: my son disna sit on ony o'
yer stools o' repentance," said Eppie Mowdiewort, demonstrating
the truth of her position with her hand clenched at the dominie,
who, like all clerks of ecclesiastical assemblies, was exceedingly
industrious in taking notes to very small purpose. "Mair nor that,
I'm maybe an unlearned woman, but I've been through the Testaments
mair nor yince--the New Testament mair nor twice--an' I never saw
naethin' aboot stools o' repentance in the hoose o' God. But my
son Saunders was readin' to me the ither nicht in a fule history
buik, an' there it said that amang the Papists they used to hae
fowk that didna do as they did an' believe as they believed. Sae
wi' a lang white serk on, an' a can'le i' their hands, they set
them up for the rabble fowk to clod at them, an' whiles they tied
them to a bit stick an' set lunt [fire] to them--an that's the
origin o' yer stool o' repentance. What say ye to that?"

Mrs. Mowdiewort's lecture on church history was not at all
appreciated by the session. The minister rose.

"We will close this sederunt," he said; "we can mak' nocht o'
these two. Alexander Mowdiewort, thou art removed from thy office
of grave-digger in the parish kirkyard, and both thysel' and thy
mother are put under suspension for contumacy!"

"Haith!" said Elspeth Mowdiewort, pushing back her hair; "did ye
ever hear the mak' o' the craitur. I haena been within his kirk
door for twenty year. It's a guid job that a body can aye gang
doon to godly Maister Welsh, though he's an awfu' body to deave
[deafen] ye wi' the Shorter Quastions."

"An it's a guid thing," added Saunders, "that there's a new
cemetery a-makkin'. There's no room for anither dizzen in yer auld
kailyaird onyway--an' that I'm tellin' ye. An' I'm promised the
new job too. Ye can howk yer ain graves yersel's."

"Fash na yer heid, Saunders, aboot them," said the old betheral at
the door; "it's me that's to be grave-digger, but ye shall howk
them a' the same in the mornin', an' get the siller, for I'm far
ower frail--ye can hae them a' by afore nine o'clock, an' the
minister disna pu' up his bedroom blind till ten!"

Thus it was that Saunders Mowdiewort ended his connection with an
Erastian establishment, and became a true and complete member of
the Marrow kirk. His mother also attended with exemplary
diligence, but she was much troubled with a toothache on the days
of catechising, and never quite conquered her unruly member to the
last. But this did not trouble herself much--only her neighbours.





CHAPTER XVII.

WHEN THE KYE COMES HAME.


That night Saunders went up over the hill again, dressed in his
best. He was not a proud lover, and he did not take a rebuff
amiss; besides, he had something to tell Meg Kissock. When he got
to Craig Ronald, the girls were in the byre at the milking, and at
every cow's tail there stood a young man, rompish Ebie Farrish at
that at which Jess was milking, and quiet Jock Forrest at Meg's.
Ebie was joking and keeping up a fire of running comment with
Jess, whose dark-browed gipsy face and blue-black wisps of hair
were set sideways towards him, with her cheek pressed upon Lucky's
side, as she sent the warm white milk from her nimble fingers,
with a pleasant musical hissing sound against the sides of the
milking-pail.

Farther up the byre, Meg leaned her head against Crummy and milked
steadily. Apparently she and Jock Forrest were not talking at all.
Jock looked down and only a quiver of the corner of his beard
betrayed that he was speaking. Meg, usually so outspoken and full
of conversation, appeared to be silent; but really a series of
short, low-toned sentences was being rapidly exchanged, so swiftly
that no one, standing a couple of yards away, could have remarked
the deft interchange.

But as soon as Saunders Mowdiewort came to the door, Jock Forrest
had dropped Crummy's tail, and slipped silently out of the byre,
even before Meg got time to utter her usual salutation of--

"Guid een to ye, Cuif! Hoo's a' the session?"

It might have been the advent of Meg's would-be sweetheart that
frightened Jock Forrest away, or again he might have been in the
act of going in any case. Jock was a quiet man who walked sedately
and took counsel of no one. He was seldom seen talking to any man,
never to a woman--least of all to Meg Kissock. But when Meg had
many "lads" to see her in the evening, he could he observed to
smile an inward smile in the depths of his yellow beard, and a
queer subterranean chuckle pervaded his great body, so that on one
occasion Jess looked up, thinking that there were hens roosting in
the baulks overhead.

Jess and Ebie pursued their flirtation steadily and harmlessly, as
she shifted down the byre as cow after cow was relieved of her
richly perfumed load, rumbling and clinking neck chains, and
munching in their head-stalls all the while. Saunders and Meg were
as much alone as if they had been afloat on the bosom of Loch
Grannoch.

"Ye are a bonny like man," said Meg, "to tak' yer minny to speak
for ye before the session. Man, I wonder at ye. I wonder ye didna
bring her to coort for ye?"

"War ye ever afore the Session, Meg?"

"Me afore the session--ye're a fule man, but ye dinna ken what yer
sayin'--gin I thocht ye did--"

Here Meg became so violently agitated that Flecky, suffering from
the manner in which Meg was doing her duty, kicked out, and nearly
succeeded in overturning the milk-pail. Meg's quickness with hand
and knee foiled this intention, but Flecky succeeded quite in
planting the edge of her hoof directly on the Cuif's shin-bone.
Saunders thereupon let go Flecky's tail, who instantly switched it
into Meg's face with a crack like a whip.

"Ye great muckle senseless hullion!" exclaimed Meg, "gin ye are
nae use in the byre, gang oot till ye can learn to keep haud o' a
coo's tail! Ye hae nae mair sense than an Eerishman!"

There was a pause. The subject did not admit of discussion, though
Saunders was a cuif, he knew when to hold his tongue--at least on
most occasions.

"An' what brocht ye here the nicht, Cuif?" asked Meg, who, when
she wanted information, knew how to ask it directly, a very rare
feminine accomplishment.

"To see you, Meg, my dawtie," replied Saunders, tenderly edging
nearer.

"Yer what?" queried Meg with asperity; "I thocht that ye had
aneuch o' the session already for caa'in' honest fowk names; gin
ye begin wi' me, ye'll get on the stool o' repentance o' yer ain
accord, afore I hae dune wi' ye!"

"But, Meg, I hae telled ye afore that I am sair in need o' a wife.
It's byordinar' [extraordinary] lonesome up in the hoose on the
hill. An' I'm warned oot, Meg, so that I'll look nae langer on the
white stanes o' the kirkyaird."

"Gin ye want a wife, Saunders, ye'll hae to look oot for a deef
yin, for it's no ony or'nar' woman that could stand yer mither's
tongue. Na, Saunders, it wad be like leevin' i' a corn-mill
rinnin' withoot sheaves."

"Meg," said Saunders, edging up cautiously, "I hae something to
gie ye!"

"Aff wi' ye, Cuif! I'll hae nae trokin' wi' lads i' the byre--na,
there's a time for everything--especial wi' widowers, they're the
warst o' a'--they ken ower muckle. My granny used to say, gin
Solomon couldna redd oot the way o' a man wi' a maid, what wad he
hae made o' the way o' a weedower that's lookin' for his third?"





CHAPTER XVIII.

A DAUGHTER OF THE PICTS.


The Cuif put his hands in his pockets as if to keep them away from
the dangerous temptation of touching Meg. He stood with his
shoulder against the wall and chewed a straw.

"What's come o' Maister Peden thae days?" asked Meg.

"He's maist michty unsettled like," replied Saunders, "he's for a'
the world like a stirk wi' a horse cleg on him that he canna get
at. He comes in an' sits doon at his desk, an' spreads oot his
buiks, an' ye wad think that he's gaun to be at it the leevelang
day. But afore ye hae time to turn roon' an' get at yer ain wark,
the craitur'll be oot again an' awa' up to the hill wi' a buik
aneath his oxter. Then he rises early in the mornin', whilk is no
a guid sign o' a learned man, as I judge. What for should a
learned man rise afore his parritch is made? There maun be
something sair wrang," said Saunders Mowdiewort.

"Muckle ye ken aboot learned men. I suppose, ye think because ye
carry up the Bible, that ye ken a' that's in't," returned Meg,
with a sneer of her voice that might have turned milk sour. The
expression of the emotions is fine and positive in the kitchens of
the farm towns of Galloway.

"SWISH, SWISH!" steadily the white streams of milk shot into the
pails. "JANGLE, JANGLE!" went the steel head chains of the cows.
Occasionally, as Jess and Meg lifted their stools, they gave
Flecky or Speckly a sound clap on the back with their hand or
milking-pail, with the sharp command of "Stan' aboot there!" "Haud
up!" "Mind whaur yer comin'!" Such expressions as these Jess and
Meg could interject into the even tenor of their conversation, in
a way that might have been disconcerting in dialogues conducted on
other principles. But really the interruptions did not affect Ebie
Farrish or any other of the byre-visiting young men, any more than
the rattling of the chains, as Flecky and Speckly arranged their
own business at the end devoted to imports. These sharp words of
command were part of the nightly and morningly ceremony of the
"milking" at every farm. The cans could no more froth with the
white reaming milk without this accompaniment of slaps and
adjurations than Speckly, Flecky, and the rest could take their
slow, thoughtfully considerate, and sober way from the hill
pastures into the yard without Meg at the gate of the field to
cry: "Hurley, Hurley, hie awa' hame!" to the cows themselves; and
"Come awa' bye wi' them, fetch them, Roger!" to the short-haired
collie, who knew so much better than to go near their flashing
heels.

The conversation in the byre proceeded somewhat in this way:

Jess was milking her last cow, with her head looking sideways at
Ebie, who stood plaiting Marly's tail in a newfangled fashion he
had brought from the low end of the parish, and which was just
making its way among young men of taste.

"Aye, ye'll say so, nae doot," said Jess, in reply to some pointed
compliment of her admirer; "but I ken you fowk frae the laich end
ower weel. Ye hae practeesed a' that kind o' talk on the lasses
doon there, or ye wadna be sae gleg [ready] wi't to me, Ebie."

This is an observation which shows that Jess could not have eaten
more effectively of the tree of knowledge, had she been born in
Mayfair.

Ebie laughed a laugh half of depreciation, half of pleasure, like
a cat that has its back stroked and its tail pinched at the same
time.

"Na, na, Jess, it a' comes by natur'. I never likit a lassie afore
I set my een on you," said Ebie, which, to say the least of it,
was curious, considering that he had an assortment of locks of
hair--black, brown, and lint-white--up in the bottom of his
"kist" in the stable loft where he slept. He kept them along with
his whipcord and best Sunday pocket knife, and sometimes he took a
look at them when he had to move them in order to get his green
necktie. "I never really likit a lass afore, Jess, ye may believe
me, for I wasna a lad to rin after them. But whenever I cam' to
Craig Ronald I saw that I was dune for."

"STAN' BACK, YE MUCKLE SLABBER!" said Jess, suddenly and
emphatically, in a voice that could have been heard a hundred
yards away. Speckly was pushing sideways against her as if to
crowd her off her stool.

"Say ye sae, Ebie?" she added, as if she had not previously
spoken, in the low even voice in which she had spoken from the
first, and which could be heard by Ebie alone. In the country they
conduct their love-making in water-tight compartments. And though
Ebie knew very well that the Cuif was there, and may have
suspected Jock Forrest, even after his apparent withdrawal, so
long as they did not trouble him in his conversation with Jess, he
paid no heed to them, nor indeed they to him. No man is his
brother's keeper when he goes to the byre to plait cows' tails.

"But hoo div ye ken, or, raither, what gars ye think that ye're no
the first that I hae likit, Jess?"

"Oh, I ken fine," said Jess, who was a woman of knowledge, and had
her share of original sin.

"But hoo div ye ken?" persisted Ebie.

"Fine that," said Jess, diplomatically.

A DAUGHTER OF THE PICTS

"But tell us, Jess," said Ebie, who was in high good humour at
these fascinating accusations.

"Oh," said Jess, with a quick gipsy look out of her fine dark
eyes, "brawly I kenned on Saturday nicht that yon wasna the first
time ye had kissed a lass!"

"Jess," said Ebie, "ye're a wunnerfu' woman!" which was his
version of Ralph's "You are a witch." In Ebie's circle "witch" was
too real a word to be lightly used, so he said "wunnerfu' woma

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