k her head at us, which tempted me to
think her a flighty maid. However, I remembered her words often
afterwards when I was in hiding.

Thereupon I presented my cousin Wat to her, and they bowed to one
another with a very courtly grace. I declare it was pretty to see them,
and also most strange in a house where the hill-folk were gathered
together. But for the sake of my father and brother we were never so
much as questioned.

Presently there was one came to the door, and cried that the preaching
was called and about to begin. So we took our bonnets and the maids
their shawls about them, and set forth. It was a grey, unkindly day, and
the clouds hung upon the heights. There are many woods of pine and oak
about the Duchrae; and we went through one of them to an ancient
moat-hill or place of defence on a hillside, with a ditch about it of
three or four yards wideness, which overlooked the narrow pack road by
the water's edge.

As we went Kate McGhie walked by my side, and we talked together. She
told me that she came against her parents' will, though not without her
father's knowledge; and that it was her great love for Maisie Lennox,
who was her friend and gossip, which had first drawn her to a belief in
the faith of the hill-folk.

"But there is one thing," said she, "that I cannot hold with them in. I
am no rebel, and I care not to disown the authority of the King!"

"Yet you look not like a sufferer in silence!" I said, smiling at her.
"Are you a maid of the Quaker folk?"

At which she was fain to laugh and deny it.

"But," I said, "if you are a King's woman, you will surely find yourself
in a strange company to-day. Yet there is one here of the same mind as
yourself."

Then she entreated me to tell her who that might be.

"Oh, not I," I replied, "I have had enough of Charles Stuart. I could
eat with ease all I like of him, or his brother either! It is my cousin
of Lochinvar, who has been lately put to the horn and outlawed."

At the name she seemed much surprised.

"It were well not to name him here," she said, "for the chief men know
of his past companying with Claverhouse and other malignants, and they
might distrust his honesty and yours."

We had other pleasant talk by the way, and she told me of all her house,
of her uncle that was at Kirkcudbright with Captain Winram and the
garrison there, and of her father that had forbidden her to go to the
field-meetings.

"Which is perhaps why I am here!"