re within. He also prayed, though his
unuttered words ran in and out between the minister's uttered ones.
Under the wintry sermon he built a dream and it glowed like jewels. At
the psalm, standing, he heard Elspeth's clear voice praising God, and
his heart lifted on that beam of song until it was as though it came
to Heaven.

"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place
In generations all.
Before thou ever hadst brought forth
The mountains great or small,
Ere ever thou hadst formed the earth
And all the world abroad,
Ev'n thou from everlasting art
To everlasting God."

"Love, love, love!" cried Glenfernie's heart. His nature did with
might what its hand found to do, and now, having turned to love
between man and woman, it loved with a huge, deep, pulsing, world-old
strength. He heard Elspeth, he felt Elspeth only; he but wished to
blend with her and go on with her forever from the heaven to heaven
which, blended so, they would make.

"... As with an overflowing flood
Thou carriest them away;
They like a sleep are, like the grass
That grows at morn are they.
At morn it flourishes and grows,
Cut down at ev'n doth fade--"

"Not grass of the field, O Lord," cried Glenfernie's heart, "but the
forest of oaks, but the stars that hold for aye, one to the other--"

CHAPTER XI

The glen was dressed in June, at its height of green movement and
song. Alexander and Elspeth walked there and turned aside through a
miniature pass down which flowed a stream in miniature to join the
larger flood. This cleft led them to a green hollow masked by the main
wall of the glen, a fairy place, hidden and lone. Seven times had the
two been in company since that morning of the flower-sprinkled cape
and the thorn-tree. First stood a chance meeting upon the moor,
Elspeth walking from the village with a basket upon her arm and the
laird riding home after business in the nearest considerable town. He
dismounted; he walked beside her to the stepping-stones before the
farm. The second time he went to White Farm, and she and Jenny, with
Merran to help, were laying linen to bleach upon the sun-washed
hillside. He had stayed an hour, and though he was not alone with her,
yet he might look at her, listen to her. She was not a chatterer; she
worked or stood, almost as silent as a master painter's subtle picture
stepped out of its frame, or as Pygmalion's statue-maid,