s playing on his
pipes. He was playing a new tune I had never heard before a wonderful,
joyous thing. I both heard and SAW him!"

Angus stood still and watched me. They both stood still and watched me,
and even in my excitement I saw that each of them looked a little pale.

"You said you did not hear him at first, but you surely saw him when
he passed so near," I protested. "I called to him, and he took off his
bonnet, though he did not stop. He was going so quickly that perhaps he
did not hear me call his name."

What strange thing in Hector's look checked me? Who knows?

"You DID see him, didn't you?" I asked of him.

Then he and Angus exchanged glances, as if asking each other to decide
some grave thing. It was Hector MacNairn who decided it.

"No," he answered, very quietly, "I neither saw nor heard him, even when
he passed. But you did."

"I did, quite plainly," I went on, more and more bewildered by the
way in which they kept a sort of tender, awed gaze fixed on me. "You
remember I even noticed that he looked pale. I laughed, you know, when I
said he looked almost like one of the White People--"

Just then my breath caught itself and I stopped. I began to remember
things--hundreds of things.

Angus spoke to me again as quietly as Hector had spoken.

"Neither Jean nor I ever saw Wee Brown Elspeth," he said--"neither Jean
nor I. But you did. You have always seen what the rest of us did not
see, my bairn--always."

I stammered out a few words, half in a whisper. "I have always seen what
you others could not see? WHAT--HAVE--I--SEEN?"

But I was not frightened. I suppose I could never tell any one what
strange, wide, bright places seemed suddenly to open and shine before
me. Not places to shrink back from--oh no! no! One could be sure,
then--SURE! Feargus had lifted his bonnet with that extraordinary
triumph in his look--even Feargus, who had been rather dour.

"You called them the White People," Hector MacNairn said.

Angus and Jean had known all my life. A very old shepherd who had looked
in my face when I was a baby had said I had the eyes which "SAW." It
was only the saying of an old Highlander, and might not have been
remembered. Later the two began to believe I had a sight they had not.
The night before Wee Brown Elspeth had been brought to me Angus had read
for the first time the story of Dark Malcolm, and as they sat near me on
the moor they had been talking about it. That was why he forgot h