."
But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,
though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black
wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile
long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of
desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;
one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist
divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,
grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so
thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked
like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this
there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that
it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of
hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing
that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no
ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its
graveyard.

"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on
Bell's Hill--do you see it?--told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising
up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most
interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit
of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in
Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"

He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,
and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,
"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what
cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears
came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the
Scotch is your one accomplishment."

But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between
them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a
sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical
changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call
his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This
was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world
became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a
dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long
steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and