l
and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting,
yet with a sorrow in the cadence.

Up the street some men sat on the Cross steps waiting the coming of the
ferry-boat from Kilcatrine, for it was the day of the weekly paper. Old
Islay went from corner to corner, looking eager out to sea, his hands
deep in the pockets of his long coat. Major McNicol put his head
cautiously out at his door that his servant lass held open and scanned
the deadly world where Frenchmen lay in ambush. He caught a glimpse of
Gilian spying from the pend close and darted in trembling, but soon came
out again, with the maid patting him kindly and assuringly on the back.
From close to close he made a tactical advance--swift dashes between on
his poor bent old limbs, and he drew up by Gilian's side.

"All's well!" said he with a breath of relier. "Man! but they're throng
to-day; the place is fair botching with them."

Gilian expressed some commonplace and left the shelter of the pend close
and went up the street round the factor's corner. He looked behind him
there. The ferry-boat from Kilcatrine was in. Young Islay had stepped
the first off the skiff and was speaking--not to his father, but to
General Turner, whose horse, spattered with foam and white with autumn
dust, a boy held at the quay head. The post-runner took a newspaper from
his pocket and handed it to the men waiting at the Cross; they hastened
into the vintners, and one of them read aloud to the company with no
need to replenish his glass. Against the breast wall the tide at the
full lapped with a pleasant sound. Mr. Spencer came out to the front of
the Inns, smoking a segar, very perjink with a brocade waistcoat and a
collar so high it rasped his ears.

Everything visible impressed itself that day acutely on Gilian as he
went out of the town; not only as if he were naked but as if he were
raw and feeling flesh, and he was glad when the turn of the road at the
Arches hid this place from his view.

A voice cried behind him, and turning around he found Peggy running
after him with a basket, Miss Mary's afterthought for the fugitive girl
on the moor.

Very quickly he sped up the hills; Nan ran out to meet him as he came up
the brae from Little Fox. She had been crying in the morning till tears
would come no longer, but now she was composed; at least her eyes
were calm and her cheeks lost the pallor they had from a night almost
sleepless in that lonely dwellin