dreamer and the hesitator, his eyes vacant. He wore a short ill-fitting
jacket; his vest had come unbuttoned in the haste of his clamber up
the moor; his bonnet was drawn low upon his brow. As he cherished the
lantern from the wind with his back bent he was no figure of the ideal
lover, but yet some tragedy was in the look of him--some great and
moving fate that might have made the night pity him. Down again to
their little knowe he went, and cast himself upon it and surrendered to
emotion. It was for him the grave of love, the new-reared mound of his
affection. Even yet he could see where she had pressed down the heather
as she reclined. Looking at the heather he remembered the white spray of
his affection that she had said would be the sign of his fate. He went
back quickly to the hut, the wind still puffing at his foolish lantern,
and he found the heather gone. It comforted him exceedingly. She had
gone, why or where he could not guess, but she had taken with her the
token of his love and thereby left him her capitulation. His heather was
at her heart!

Wearied utterly, as much by the stress of his passions as by the ardours
of the day, he took possession of her couch and slept till morning.

CHAPTER XXXVI--CONCLUSION

Fair day in the town, and cattle roved about the street, bellowing, the
red and shaggy fellows of the moors, mourning in Gaelic accent and with
mild large eyes pondering on the mysteries of change. Behind them went
the children, beating them lightly on the flanks with hazel wands,
imagining themselves travellers over the markets of the world, and
others, the older ones, the bolder ones, went from shop to shop for
farings, eating, as they went, the parley-man and carvey-cake of the
Fair day. Farmers and shepherds gossiped and bargained on the footpaths
or on the grass before the New Inns; the Abercrombie clattered with
convivial glass and sometimes rose the chorus to a noisy ditty of Lorn.
Old Brooks, with his academy shut for holiday, stood at the Church
corner with a pocket full of halfpence for his bairns, and a little
silver in his vest for the naughty ones he had thrashed with the ferule
and grieved for. "To be good and clever is to be lucky enough," he said;
"I must be kind to my poor dunces." Some of them, he saw, went with his
gift straight to Marget Maclean's. "Ah," he said, smiling to himself,
"they're after the novelles! I wish Virgil was so much the favourite, or
even the Grammarian.