se glens without saying to each other why.

Gilian went little to town in that weather, he was getting credit
with Miss Mary, if not with her brothers, for a new interest in his
profession. Nor did Nan. Her father did not let her go much without
himself, he had his own reasons for keeping her from hearing the gossip
of the streets.

A week or two passed. The corn, in the badger's moon, yellowed and
hung; silent days of heat haze, all breathless, came on the country;
the stubble fields filled at evening with great flights of birds moving
south. A spirit like Nan's, that must ever be in motion, could not but
irk to share such a doleful season; she went more than ever about
the house of Maam sighing for lost companions, and a future not to be
guessed at. Only she would cheer up when she had her duties done for the
afternoon and could run out to the hillside to meet Gilian if he were
there.

She was thus running, actually with a song on her lips, one day, when
she ran into the arms of her uncle as he came round the corner of the
barn.

"Where away?" said he shortly, putting her before him, with his hands
upon her shoulders.

She reddened, but answered promptly, for there was nothing clandestine
in her meetings on the bare hillside with Gilian.

"The berries again," she said. "Some of the people from Glen Aray are
coming over."

"Some of the people," he repeated ironically; "that means one particular
gentleman. My lassie, there's an end coming to that."

He drew a large-jointed coarse hand through his tangled beard and
chuckled to himself.

"Are you aware of that?" he went on. "An end coming to it. Oh! I see
things; I'm no fool: I could have told your father long ago, but he's
putting an end to it in his own way, and for his own reasons."

"I have no idea what you mean," she said, surprised at the portentous
tone. She was not a bit afraid of him, though he was so little in
sympathy with her youth, so apparently in antagonism to her.

"What would you say to a man?" he asked cunningly.

"It would depend, uncle," she said readily and cheerfully, though a
sudden apprehension smote her at the heart. "It would depend on what he
said to me first."

The old man grinned callously as the only person in the secret.

"Suppose he said: 'Come away home, wife, I've paid a bonny penny for
ye'?"

"Perhaps I would say, if I was in very good humour at the time, 'You've
got a bonny wife for your bonny penny.' More likely I w