ise, and
said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."
To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone
spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.

There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn
floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an
invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.
But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than
anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy
and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight
squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her
balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,
the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the
stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the
water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.

There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened
every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a
windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the
Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy
confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its
yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this
brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it
an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath
the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a
kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will
that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall
from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.
Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should
sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow
lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined
in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of
whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the
unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake
perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It
suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was
like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in