With wanton petulant fingers she pulled the haws from the hedge beside her, and took a strand of her hair between her teeth and bit it in her reverie of wilfulness.

"Perhaps," said Gilian, coming closer, "it is better to be at home and soldiering in your mind instead of marching and fighting." It was a thought that came to him in a flash and must find words, but somehow he felt ashamed when he had uttered them.

"I do not understand you a bit," said Nan, with a puzzled look in her face. "Oh, you mean to pretend to yourself," she added immediately.

"That might be good enough for a girl, but surely it would not be good enough for you. You are to be a soldier, my father says, and he laughs as if it were something droll."

"It is not droll at all," said Gilian stammering, very much put out.

"There are three old soldiers in our house and----"

"One of them Captain Mars, Captain Mars, Who never saw scars!" said the girl mischievously, familiar with the town's song. "I hope you do not think of being a soldier like Mars. Perhaps that is what my father laughs at when he says the Paymaster is to make you a soldier."

"Oh, that!" said Gilian, a little relieved. "I thought you were thinking I would not be man enough for a soldier."

Nan opened the gate and came out to measure herself beside him. "You're a little bigger than I am," said she, somewhat regretfully. "Perhaps you will be big enough for a soldier. But what about that when you think you would sooner stay at home and pretend, than go with the army? Did you see the soldier who kissed his hand to me? The liberty!" And she laughed with odd gaiety as if her mood resented the soldier's freedom.

"He was very thin and little," said Gilian, enviously.

"I thought he was quite big enough," said Nan promptly, "and he was so good-looking!"

"Was he?" asked Gilian gloomily. "Well, he was not like the Cornal or the General. They were real soldiers and have seen tremendous wars."

"I daresay," said Nan, "but no more than my father. I cannot but wonder at you; with the chance to be a soldier like my father or--or the General, being willing to sit at home pretending or play-acting it in school or----"

"I did not say I would prefer it," said the boy; "I only said it could be done."

"I believe you would sooner do it that way than the other," she said, standing back from him, and looking with shrewd scrutiny. "Oh, I don't like the kind of boy you are."

"Except when you are singing, and then you like to have me listening because I understand," said Gilian, smiling with pleasure at his own astuteness.

She reddened at his discovery and then laughed in some confusion. "You are thinking of the time I sang in the cabin to Black Duncan. You looked so white and curious sitting yonder in the dark, I could have stopped my song and laughed."

"You could not," he answered quite boldly, "because your eyes were----"

"Never mind that," said she abruptly. "I was not speaking of singing or of eyes, but I'm telling you I like men, men, men, the kind of men who do things, brave things, hard things, like soldiers. Oh, I wish I was the soldier who kissed his hand to me! What is pretending and thinking?

I can do that in a way at home over my sampler or my white seam. But to be commanding, and fighting the enemies of the country, to be good with the sword and the gun and strong with a horse, like my father!"

"I have seen your father," said Gilian. "That is the kind of soldier I would like to be." He said so, generously, with some of the Highland flauery; he said so meaning it, for Turner the bold, the handsome, the adventurer, the man with years of foreign life in mystery, was always the ideal soldier of Brooks' school.

"You are a far nicer boy than I thought you were," said she enjoying the compliment. "Only--only--I think when you can pretend so much to yourself you cannot so well do the things you pretend. You can be soldiering in your mind so like the real thing that you may never go soldiering at all. And of course that would not be the sort of soldier my father is."

A mellowed wail of the bagpipe came from Strone, the last farewell of the departing soldiers; it was but a moment, then was gone. The wind changed from the land, suddenly the odours of the traffics of peace blew familiarly, the scents of gathered hay and the more elusive perfume of yellowing corn. A myriad birds, among them the noisy rooks the blackest and most numerous, sped home. In the bay the skiffs spread out their pinions, the halyards singing in the blocks, the men ye-hoing. For a s.p.a.ce the bows rose and fell, lazy, reluctant to be moving in their weary wrestle with the sea, then tore into the blue and made a feather of white. Gilian looked at them and saw them the birds of night and sea, the birds of prey, the howlets of the brine, flying large and powerful throughout the under-sky that is salt and swinging and never lit by moon or star. And as the boats followed each other out of the bay, a gallant company, the crews leaned on tiller or on mast and sang their Gaelic _iorrams_ that ever have the zest of the oar, the melancholy of the wave.

As it were in a pious surrender to the influence of the hour, he and the girl walked slowly, silently, by the wayside, busy with their own imaginings. They were all alone.

Beyond the Boshang Gate is an entrance to the policies, the parks, the gardens, of the Duke, standing open with a welcome, a trim roadway edged with bush and tree. Into it Nan and Gilian walked, almost heedless, it might seem, of each other's presence, she plucking wild flowers as she went from bush to bush, humming the refrain of the fishers' songs, he with his eyes wide open looking straight before him yet with some vague content to have her there for his companion.

When they spoke again they were in the cloistered wood, the sea hidden by the ma.s.sive trees.

"I will show you my heron's nest," said Gilian, anxious to add to the riches the ramble would confer on her.

She was delighted. Gilian at school had the reputation of knowing the most wonderful things of the woods, and few were taken into his confidence.

He led her a little from the path to the base of a tall tree with its trunk for many yards up as bare as a pillar.

"There it is," he said, pointing upward to a knot of gathered twigs swaying in the upper branches.

"Oh! is it so high as that?" she cried, with disappointment. "What is the use of showing me that? I cannot see the inside and the birds."

"But there are no birds now," said Gilian; "they are flown long ago.

Still I'm sure you can easily fancy them there. I see them quite plainly. There are three eggs, green-blue like the sky up the glen, and now--now there are three grey hairy little birds with tufts on their heads. Do you not see their beaks opening?"

"Of course I don't," said Nan impatiently, straining her eyes for the tree-top. "If they are all flown how can I see them?"

Gilian was disappointed with her. "But you think you see them, you think very hard," he said, "and if you think very hard they will be there quite true."

Nan stamped her foot angrily. "You are daft," said she. "I don't believe you ever saw them yourself."

"I tell you I did," he protested hotly.

"Were you up the tree?" she pressed, looking him through with eyes that then and always wrenched the prosaic truth from him.

He flushed more redly than in his eagerness of showing the nest, his eyes fell, he stammered.

"Well," said he, "I did not climb the tree. What is the good when I know what is there? It is a heron's nest."

"But there might have been no eggs and no birds in it at all," she argued.

"That's just it," said he eagerly. "Lots of boys would be for climbing and finding that out, and think how vexatious it would be after all that trouble! I just made the eggs and the young ones out of my own mind, and that is far better."

At the innocence of the explanation Nan laughed till the woods rang. Her brown hair fell upon her neck and brow, the flowers tumbled at her feet all mingled and beautiful as if summer has been raining on its queen. A bird rose from the thicket, chuck-chucking in alarm, then fled, trailing behind him a golden chain of melody.

CHAPTER XIII--A GHOST

I think that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and girl so enviable in their innocence and happiness. Gilian knelt and gathered up the flowers. It was, perhaps, more to hide his vexation than from courtesy that he did so, but the act was so unboylike, so deferring in its manner, that it restored to Nan as much of her good humour as her laughter had not brought back with it. As he lifted the flowers and put them together, there seemed to come from the fresh lush stalks of them some essence of the girl whose hands had culled and grasped them, a feeling of her warm palm. And when handing her the re-gathered flowers he felt the actual touch of her fingers, his head for a second swam. He wondered. For in the touch there had been something even more potent and pleasing than in the mother-touch of Miss Mary's hand that day when first he came to the town, the mother-touch that revealed a world not of kindness alone--for that was not new, he had it from the little old woman whose face was like a nut--but of understanding and sympathy.

"Have you any more wonders to show?" said Nan, now all in the humour of adventure.

"Nothing you would care for," he said. "There are lots of places just for thinking at, but----"

"I would rather them to be places to be seeing at," said Nan.

Gilian reflected, and "You know the Lady's Linn?" he said.

She nodded.

"Well," said he. "Do you know the story of it, and why it is called the Lady's Linn?"