Gilian was not unhappy at the a.s.sumption, but felt warm, and Nan reddened.

"Not at all," she answered with some difficulty. "It's just a friend who convoyed me up."

"Well I kent it," said the old woman, who spoke English to show she was displeased, and there was in her voice a tone of satisfaction with her own shrewdness. "When I saw you coming up the way there I thought there was something very unlike the thing about this person with you. The other one would have been a little closer on your elbow, and a lantern's a very queer contrivance to be stravaiging with on a summer day."

All her contempt seemed to be for Gilian, and he felt mightily uncomfortable.

"Tell me this," she went on, suddenly taking Nan by the arm and bending a most condemnatory face on her; "tell mc this: did you run away from the other one?"

"Mercy on me!" cried the girl. "Is the story up here already?"

"Oh, we're not so far back," said the dame, who did not add that her son the seaman had told her the news on his last weekly visit.

"Then I'll need the less excuse for being here," said Nan, trying to find in the hard and unapproving visage any trace of the woman who in happier days used to be so kind a nurse.

"No excuse at all!" said old Elasaid. "If it's your father's wish you're flying from, you need not come here." She stepped within the house, pulled out the wattle door and between it and the fir post stuck a disapproving face.

"Go away! go away!" she cried harshly, "I have no room for a baggage of that kind." Then she shut the door in their faces; they could hear the bar run to in the staples.

For a minute or two they stood aghast and silent, and Nan was plainly close on tears. But the humour of the thing struck her quick enough--sooner than Gilian saw it--and she broke into laughter, subdued so that it might not reach the woman righteous within, and her ear maybe at the door c.h.i.n.k. It was not perhaps of the heartiest merriment, but it inspired her companion with respect for her spirit in a moment so trying. She was pale, partly with weariness, partly with distress at this unlooked-for reception; but her lips, red and luscious, smiled for his encouragement.

"Must we go back?" he asked, irresolute, as they made some slow steps away from the door.

"Back!" said Nan, her eyes flashing. "Am I mad? Are you speaking for yourself? If it must be back for you let me not be keeping you. After all you bargained for no more than to take me to old Elasaid's, and now that I'm here and there's none of the Elasaid I expected to meet me, I'll make the rest of my way somewhere myself." But her gaze upon that rolling and bleak moorland was far less confident than her words.

Gilian made no reply. He only looked at her reproaching for her bitterness, and humbly took up step by her side as she walked quickly away from the scene of the cold reception.

They had gone some distance when Elasaid opened her door again and came out to look after them. She saw a most touching helplessness in the manner of their uncertain walk across the heather, with no fixed mind as to which direction was the best, stopping and debating, moving now a little to the east, now a little to the west, but always further into the region of the lochs. She began to blame herself for her hastiness.

She had expected that, face to face with her disapproval, the foolish young people would have gone back the road they came; but here they were going further than ever away from the father in whose interest she had loyally refused her hospitality. She cried loudly after them with a short-breathed Gaelic halloo, too much like an animal's cry to attract their attention. Nan did not hear it at all; Gilian but dreamed it, as it were, and though he took it for the call of a moor-fowl, found it in his ready fancy alarmingly like the summons of an irate father. But now he dared betray no hesitancy; he did not even turn to look behind him.

Elasaid cried again, but still in vain. She concluded they were deliberately deaf to her, and "Let them go!" she said crabbedly, flaunting an eloquent arm to the winds, comforting herself with the thought that there was no other house in all that dreary country to give them the shelter she had denied.

The sun by this time was pouring into the moor from a sky without a speck of cloud. Compared with the brown and purple of the moor and the dull colour of Ben Bhreac--the mount away to the southeast--the heavens were uncommonly blue, paling gradual to their dip. In another hour than this distressed and perplexed one, our wanderers would have felt some jocund influence in a forenoon so benign and handsome.

And now, too, the country began to show more of its true character. Its little lochs--a great chain of them--dashed upon their vision in patches of blue or grey or yellow. The valley was speckled with the tarns.

Gilian forgot the hazards of the enterprise and the discomforts to be faced; he had no time to think of what was to be done next for them in their flight, so full was he with the romance of those mult.i.tudinous lakelets lost in the empty and sunny wilds, some with isle, all with shelving heathery braes beside them, or golden bights where the little wave lapped. He turned to his companion with an ecstasy.

"Did you ask me if I rued it?" he said. "Give me no better than to stay here for ever--with you to share it."

She met his ardour with coolness. "I wish you had been so certain of that a little ago," she said; "you seem very much on the swither. Have you thought of what's to be done next? It is all very well to be putting our backs to the angry Elasaid behind us there, but all the time I'm wondering what's to be the outcome."

He confessed himself at a loss. She eyed him without satisfaction. This young gentleman, who seemed so enchanting in circ.u.mstances where no readiness of purpose was needed, looked very inadequate in the actual stress of things, in the broad daylight, his flat bonnet far back on his brow, his face wan, his plaid awry. And there was something in his carriage of the ridiculous lantern that made her annoyed at herself for some reason.

She stopped, and they hung hesitating, with the lapwings crying about them, and no other sound in the air.

"I'm going back," said she, as if she meant it. His face fell. This time there was no mistaking his distress.

"No, no, you cannot, Nan," he said. "We will get out of it somehow; you cannot return, and what of me? It would be ill to explain."

"We're neither whaup nor deer," said she, shrugging her shoulders, "to live here wild the rest of our days."

Gilian looked about him rather helplessly, and he started at the sight of a gable wall, with what in a shealing might pa.s.s for a window in it, and he knew it for a relic of the old days, when the moor in its levels here would be spotted with happy summer homes, when the people of Lochow came from the sh.o.r.es below and gave their cattle the juicy grazing of these untamed pastures, themselves living the ancient life, with singing and spinning in the open, gathering at nights for song or dance and tale in the fine weather.

"There's something of shelter at least," he said, pointing to it. She looked dubiously at the dry-stone walls almost tumbling, the cabars of what had been a byre fallen over half the interior, and at the rank nettles--head-high almost--about the rotten door.

"Is this home-coming?" she said whimsically, forcing a smile, but she was glad to see it. By this time she was master of her companion's mind, and could guess that it would be to him a palace for them both. But they went up towards the abandoned hut, glad enough, both of them, to see an edifice, even in decay, showing man had once been there, where now the world about seemed given over to vacant sunshine or the wild winds of heaven, the rains, and doleful birds. It stood between two lochs that were separated from each other by but a hundred yards of heather and rush, its back-end to one of the lochs, the door to Ben Bhreac.

Gilian went first and trod down the nettles, making a path that she might the more comfortably reach this sanctuary so melancholy. She gathered up her gown close round her, dreading the touch of these kind plants that hide the shame of fallen lintels and the sorrow of cold hearths, and timidly went to the door, her shawl fallen from one of her shoulders and dragging at the other. She put her head within, and as she did so, the lad caught the shawl, unseen by her, and kissed the fringe, wishing he could do so to her lips.

A cold damp air was in the dwelling, that had no light but from the half open door and the vent in the middle of the roof.

She drew back shuddering in spite of herself, though her whole desire was to seem content with any refuge now that she had brought him so far on what looked like a gowk's errand.

He ventured an a.s.suring arm around her waist and they went slowly in together, and stood silent in the middle of the floor where the long-dead fire had been, saying nothing at all till their eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom.

What she felt beyond timidity she betrayed not, but Gilian peopled the house at an instant with all its bygone tenants, seeing the peats ruddy on the stones, the smoke curling up among the shining cabars, hearing ghosts gossiping in m.u.f.fled Gaelic round the fire.

Yet soon they found even in this relic of old long-gone people the air of domesticity; it was like a shelter even though so poor a one; it was some sort of an end to her quest for a refuge, though the more she looked at its dim interior the more content she was with the outside of it. Where doubtless many children had played, on the knowe below a single shrub of fir-wood beside the loch, Nan spread out the remains of her breakfast again and they prepared to make a meal. Gilian gathered the dry heather tufts, happy in his usefulness, thinking her quite content too, while all the time she was puzzling as to what was next to be done. Never seemed a bleak piece of country so lovely to him as now.

As he rose from bending over the heather and looked around, seeing the moor in its many colours stretch in swelling waves far into the distance, the lochans winking to the day and over all a kind soft sky, he was thrilling with his delight.

She summoned him in a little to eat. He looked at her scanty provender, and there was as much of truth as self-sacrifice in his words as he said: "I do not care for eating; I am just satisfied with seeing you there and the world so fine." And still exulting in that rare solitude of two he went farther off by Little Fox Loch and sought for white heather, symbol of luck and love, as rare to find among the red as true love is among illusion. Searching the braes he could hear, after a little, Nan sing at the shealing hut. A faint breeze brought the strain to him faintly so that it might be the melody of fairydom heard at eves on gra.s.sy hillocks by the gifted ear, the melody of the gentle other world, had he not known that it had the words of "The Rover." Nan was singing it to keep up her heart, far from cheerful, tortured indeed with doubt and fear, and yet the listener found in the notes content and hope. When he came back with his spray of white heather he was so uplifted with the song that he ran up to her for once with no restraint and made to fasten it at her neck. She was surprised at his new freedom but noway displeased. A little less self-consciousness as he fumbled at the riband on her neck would have satisfied her more, but even that disappeared when he felt her breath upon his hair and an unconscious touch of her hand on his arm as he fastened the flower. She let her eyes drop before his bold rapture, he could have kissed her there and then and welcome. But he only went halfway. When the heather was fastened, he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, remembering some inadequate tale in the books of Margot Maclean.

"John Hielan'man! John Hielan'man!" she said within herself, and suddenly she tore the white spray from her bosom and threw it pa.s.sionately at her feet, while tears of vexation ran to her eyes.

"Forgive me, forgive me, I have vexed you again," said Gilian, contrite.

"I should not be so bold."

She could not but smile through her tears.

"If you will take my heather again and say nothing of it, I will never take the liberty again," he went on, eager to make up for his error.

"Then I will not take it," she answered.

"It was stupid of me," said he.

"It is," she corrected meaningly.

"I never had any acquaintance with--with--girls," he added, trying to find some excuse for himself.

"That is plain enough," she agreed cordially, and she followed it with a sigh.

For a minute they stood thus irresolute and then the lad bent and lifted the ill-used heather. He held it in his hand for a moment tenderly as if it was a thing that lived, and sighed over it, and then, fearing that, too, might seem absurd to her and vexatious, he made an effort and twirled it between a finger and thumb by its stem like any casual wild-flower culled without reflection.

"What are you going to do with it now?" she asked him, affecting indifference, but eyeing it with interest; and he made no answer, for how could he tell her he meant to keep it always for remembrance? "Give it to me," she said suddenly, and took it from his fingers. She ran into the house and placed it in the only fragment of earthenware left by the departed tenants. "It will do very well there," she said.

"But I meant it for you," said Gilian ruefully, "It is a sign of good luck."

"It is a sign of more than that, I've heard many a time," she replied, and he became very red indeed, for he knew that as well as she, though he had not said it. "I'll take it for the luck," she went on.