ey parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster's
house.

CHAPTER XXVII--ALARM

Nan's uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides
of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature's caprice with sheep and
crop, man's injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons,
nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life's dolours, would
be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries
or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A
gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard--a
fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man's face--he
looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of
Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from
above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood
he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to
find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never
word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out
feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine
uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable,
then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more
than ever.

He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the
bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for
Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was
off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a
tryst of her own making. She was indifferent--I have no excuse for her,
and she's my poor heroine--about his wasted hours so long as she had
her days illumined by some flicker of life and youth. He never knew
how often it was from weeping over a letter from Edinburgh, or a song
familiar elsewhere, upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet
him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand
this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam--and Young Islay
was for reasons away in the Lowlands--this dreamer of the wild, with
the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very
well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts.
So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real
lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers have ever been
meeting in the woods of the