y.

In the farmyard the workers were preparing to depart for the night from
their long day of toil. All but the last of the horses had been stabled;
the shepherds were returning from the fanks; two women, the weariness of
their bodies apparent in their attitudes even in the dusk, stood for
a little in the yard, then with arms round each other's waists went
towards the cot-house, singing softly as they went. The General's voice
in Gaelic rose over all but the river's murmur, as he called across
the wattle gate to a herd-boy bearing in peat for the night and morning
fires. And the night was all wrapt in an odour of bog myrtle and
flowers.

That outer world, for once, had no interest for Gilian; his eyes were on
the windows, and though the interior of Maam was utterly unknown to him
from actual sight, he was fancying it in every detail. He knew the upper
room where Nan slept; he had watched the light come to it and disappear,
every night since she had returned, though he could not guess how in
that eminent flame she was reading the memorials, the letters, the
diaries of her lost lowland life and weeping for her solitude.

The light was not there now; it was too early in the evening, so she
must be in the room whose two windows shone on the grass between
the house and the barn. He could see them plainly as he stood in the
planting, and he busied himself, forgetting all the outside interests of
the house, in picturing its interior. Nan, he told himself, sat sewing
or reading within, still the tall lady of his day-dreams, for he had not
yet seen her since her return.

And then he heard her harpsichord, its unfamiliar music amazing him by
its relation to some world he did not know, the world from which she
had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that
ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed
only to rough men's voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh
fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the
hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with associations of life
genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan
so far removed as then from him, the home-staying dreamer. Up rose his
startled judgment and called him fool.

But hark! her voice came in and joined the harpsichord--surely this time
he was not mistaken? Her voice! it was certainly her voice! He held his
breath to listen for fear he should lose the so