ded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I
gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an
attentive attitude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the
den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the
hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly,
I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.

* * * * *

From that moment not a day passed without my visiting the burn. It
summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day,
at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness
through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the
sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.
Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in
stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I
fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating
with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At
moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my
rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice
from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that
last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.
My visits to its bed were not unobserved. One morning my cousin Gavin
said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that
ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you
ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the
children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and
answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had
been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for
you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to
work, for work is the best man-maker after all."

And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the
face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the
voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to
me than the mind of any man.