s, then!"

She tried to free herself, and the white heather at her neck fell
between them. She stooped for it and he to get her kiss, but she was
first successful. To him she held out the twig of pale bells.

"The kiss or that; you can have either," she said. "One is love and the
other is luck."

"Then, sweetheart, I'll have both," said Young Islay.

CHAPTER XXXV--AN EMPTY HUT

The town bell rang, the little shops were shuttered. Miss Mary, with a
new cap on to do justice to the occasion, had sat for hours with Gilian
at the window, waiting; the Cornal was in bed, and the Paymaster,
dubious but not unpleased, was up at MacGibbon's telling the story over
a game of dambrod. And still Nan did not appear. There was a sign of
changing weather above Strone, and Gilian was full of sorrow to think of
the girl travelling to him through darkness and rain, so he started out
to meet her by the only path on which she must come.

He reached the lochs as the night was drawing in. The moor was sounding
loud and eerie with the call of large birds. Very cold and uncharitable,
a breeze came from Cruach-an-Lochain, and in the evening dusk the
country seemed most woefully poor and uninhabitable. So it appeared to
Gilian for a moment when at last he came to the head of the brae where
he should have his first sight of the light that could make that wild as
warm and hospitable and desirable as a king's court. There was no light
now! At first he doubted his eyesight; then he thought he was not at the
right point of view; then he was compelled to confess to himself that
darkness was assuredly where before had been a bright spot like one of
the stars that shine in murky heavens in the midst of storms to prove
that God does not forget.

She had been kept, the dear heart, he told himself; she had been kept by
her modesty waiting for the dusk, and fallen asleep for weariness.

He went awkwardly off the customary track so that he might reach the
shealing the quicker by a short cut that led through boggy grass. He
stumbled in hags and tripped on ancient heather-tufts; the birds
wheeled and mocked over him, something in their note most melancholy and
menacing to his ear.

The loch with the islet was muttering in its sleep, and woke with the
shriek of a thousand frightened birds when this phantom stumbled on
its solitude. The tiny island even in the dusk rose black like a hearse
plume in the water. At his feet he felt upon a stone the ti