l they trod odorously, or the heather in its rare
clumps. No sound came louder than the tumbling waters; their voices,
as they spoke even yet guardedly as people will in enterprises the
most solitary when their consciences are unresting, seemed strange and
unfamiliar to each other.

Soon they were on the summit of the hill range and below them lay the
two glens, and the first breath of the morning came behind from Strone,
where dawn threw a wan grey flag across the world. They plunged into the
caldine trees of Strongara, sped fast across Aray at Three Bridges, and
the dawn was on Balantyre, where the farm-touns high and low lay like
thatched forts, grey, cold, unwelcoming in the morning, with here and
there a stream of peat reek from the _greasach_ of the night's fires.
They became, as it might be, children again as they hastened through
the country. He lost all his diffident dubiety and was anew the bold
adventurer, treading loverlike upon the very stars. A passion of
affection was on him; he would take her unresisting hand and lead her
as though she were his, really, and before them was their moated castle.
And Nan forgot herself in the fresh zest of the dewy morning that now
was setting the birds to their singing in the dens that hang above the
banks of the Balantyre burn.

A rosy flush came to the hills where on the upper edges spread the
antlers of deer sniffing the wind, rejoicing in the magnificence of the
fine highland country in its autumn time. Nan hummed and broke into a
strain of the verse of Donacha Ban that chants the praise of day and
deer-hunting; she charmed her comrade; he felt the passion of the
possessor and stopped and turned upon her and made to kiss. She laughed
temptingly, drew back, warding her lips with the screen that now she
had arranged in a new and pleasing fashion on her shoulders so that she
looked some Gaelic huntress of the wilds. "So, so, Gilian!" said she,
"you have found that there might be more in the books than simply to
take the girl away with not so much as 'Have you a mouth?' when she
stepped out at the window."

"What a fool I was!" he cried. "I was thinking of it all the time, but
did not dare." But awakened to the actuality of what he now had dared,
he was ashamed to go further.

Nan laughed. He looked odd indeed standing facing her with the lantern
burning yet in his hand though the day was almost wide-awake. He was a
poet bearing his own light about the world extravagan