the waterfall, which a
sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If
we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love
the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that
daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I
really am a fool sometimes!"

Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if
he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite
exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal
they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to
him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.
She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the
early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her
beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her
soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of
her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have
been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional
languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces
expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about
the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so
busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the
lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave
naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing
the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more
certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing
with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of
the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough
stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made
him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead
for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had
come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the
loch.

"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this
bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.
The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a
gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a
good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies