was an enviable place for compactness and comfort, and he could
feel as if the desirable world was in his immediate neighbourhood. Down
in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights
with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each
with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of
tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the
dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor
shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth's
manifest duty to do.

But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable.
For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them;
the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the
world. "Come away," said the breezes; passing gipsies all jangling with
tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling. When the
summer was just on the turn at that most pitiful' of periods, the
autumn, he must go more often down to town.

CHAPTER XXI--THE SORROWFUL SEASON

It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the
lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful
from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the
shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress,
growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The
separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed
a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some
universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape
so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in
upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus
affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some
flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town.
He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have
seemed--if not handsome altogether--at least notable and pleasant to
any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men
full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of
place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw
anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it,
puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his
appearance on the street or on the highway put a