n was speeding. The sun had passed the trees that round the
Tolbooth walls and a beam from his majesty came boldly into the den by
the companion. It struck a slanting passage on the floor and revealed
the figure of a girl at her ease dangling her feet upon a water anker
with her hair a flood of spate-brown fallen back upon its fastening
band. And the boy saw her again as it were quite differently from
before, still the robust woman-child, but rich, ripe, blooded at
the plump inviting lip, warm at the throbbing neck. About her hung a
searching odour that overcame the common and vulgar odours of the ship,
its bilge, its tar, its oak-bark tan, its herring scale, an odour he
knew of woods in the wet spring weather. It made him think of short
grasses and the dewdrop glittering in the wet leaf; then the sky shone
blue against a tremble of airy leaf. The birch, the birch, he had it!
And having it he knew the secret of the odour. She had already the
woman's trick of washing her hair in the young birch brewings.

"I will sing 'The Rover' and I will sing 'The Man with the Coat of
Green,'" said she, with the generosity of one with many gifts. And she
started upon her ditty. She had a voice that as yet was only in its
making; it was but a promise of the future splendour, yet to Gilian, the
hearer, it brought a new and potent joy. With 'The Rover' he lived in
the woods, and set foot upon foreign wharves; 'The Man with the Coat
of Green' had his company upon the morning adventures in the islands of
fairydom. It was then, as in after years she was the woman serious, when
her own songs moved her, with her dalliance and indifference gone. A
tear trembled at her eyes at the trials of the folk she sang.

"You sing--you sing--you sing like the wind in the trees," said the
seaman, stirred to unaccustomed passion. The little cabin, when she
was done, seemed to shrink from the limitless width of the world to the
narrowness of a cell, and Gilian sat stunned. He had followed her
song in a rapture she had seen and delighted in for all the apparent
surrender of her emotion; she saw now the depth to which she had touched
him, and was greatly pleased with this conquest of her art. Clearly he
was no common Glen Aray boy, so she sang one or two more songs to show
the variety of her budget, and the tears he could not restrain were
her sweetest triumph. At last, "I must be going," said she. "Good-bye,
Duncan, and do not be forgetting my beads." Then sh