with a gladness at the sense
of his sufficiency in such an enterprise. His was the right nature for
knight-errantry in a case like hers, but then she reflected that he was
away from home--her father had casually let that drop in conversation
at breakfast yesterday; and even if he had been at home, said cooler
thought, she would hesitate to enlist him in so sordid a cause.

Then Gilian occurred--less well adapted, she felt, for the
circumstances; but she could speak more freely to him than to any other,
and he was out there in the hazel-wood, no doubt, still waiting for
her. Gilian would do, Gilian would have to do. If he could have seen how
unimpassioned she was in coming to this conclusion he would have been
grieved.

She went out at once, leisurely and with her thoughts constrained
upon some unimportant matter, so that her face might not betray her
tribulation when she met him.

In the low fields her uncle was scanning the hills with his hands arched
above his eyes to shield them from the glare of the westering sun,
groaning for the senselessness of sheep that must go roaming on
altitudes when they are wanted specially in the plains. She evaded his
supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came
upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first
words showed her the way to a speedy explanation.

"Next week," said he, "we'll try Strongara; the place is as full of
berries as the night is full of stars. Here they're not so ripe as on
the other side."

"Next week the berries might be as numerous as that at the very door of
Maam," said she, "and I none the better for them."

"What's the matter?" he cried, appalled at the omen of her face.

"My father is going abroad at once," she answered.

"Abroad?" he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked
for the crimson of its leafage. He drew it through his hands and the
thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too!
She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late
days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at
an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice
to think on expectantly in slow-passing forenoons, and no light to shine
like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!

"Well," she said, looking curiously at him. "My father is going abroad,
have you heard?"

"I have not," he answered; and she was relieved, f