look at the spectacle, when they came on the face of the Cruach. For
a little they did not speak.

"My God!" said Gilian at last, a lump somewhere at his throat. "It seems
as if this place had been waiting on us tenantless since the start of
time. Where have we been to be so long and so far away from it? _Mo
chridhe, mo chridhe!_"

"Now that I see it," said she doubtfully, "it seems melancholy enough. I
wish----" She hung upon her sentence, with a rueful gaze out of her eyes
at the scene.

"Melancholy!" he repeated. "Of course, of course," he quickly came
to her reflection, "what could it be but melancholy with all the past
unrecoverable behind it? It must be brooding for its people gone. Empty,
empty, but I see all the old peoples roaming in bands over it, the sun
smiting them, the rain drenching, I cannot but be thinking of shealing
huts that spotted the levels, of bairns crying about the doors, of
nights of _ceilidh_ round peat fires dead and cold now, but yet with the
smoke of them hanging somewhere round the universe."

He stopped, and turned away from her, concealing his perturbation.

She shivered at the thought and partly from weariness and hunger, with
a little sucking in of the breath his ear caught, and he turned, a
different man.

"You are tired; will we rest before we go further?" "Is it far?" she
asked.

He reddened. He cast a fast glance round the country as if to look for
some familiar landmark, but all was strange to him.

"I do not know," he confessed humbly. "I was never on the moor before."

"Mercy!" she said. "I thought there was never a lad from town but had
fished here."

"But I was different," he replied. "The woods and waters about the door
were enough for me. But we'll get to Elasaid's very soon, I'm sure, and
find fire, food, and rest."

She bit her nether lip in annoyance at a courtier so ill-prepared for
their adventure. She turned to look back to the familiar country they
were leaving behind them, and for a moment wished she had never come.

"I wish we could have them now," she said at last; the words drawn from
her by her weariness.

"And so we can," said he eagerly, with a delight at a reflection that
sprung into his mind like a revelation. "We can go down to the water
there and build a fire, and rest and eat. It will be like what I
fancied, a real adventure of hunters, and I will be the valet, and you
will be the--the queen."

So they went down to the lake side. Heather