e! with her pretty feet on a footstool before it:
in those days ladies wore open shoes, and showed dainty stockings.
Her face looked rosy, but it was from the firelight, for when she
turned it towards them, it showed pale as usual. She received them,
as always, with the same simple sincerity that had been hers on the
bank of the Lorrie burn. But Gibbie read some trouble in her eyes,
for his soul was all touch, and, like a delicate spiritual
seismograph, responded at once to the least tremble of a
neighbouring soul. The minister was not present, and Mrs. Sclater
had both to be the blazing coal, and keep blowing herself, else,
however hot it might be at the smouldering hearth, the little
company would have sent up no flame of talk.

When tea was over, Gibbie went to the window, got within the red
curtains, and peeped out. Returning presently, he spelled with
fingers and signed with hands to Ginevra that it was a glorious
night: would she not come for a walk? Ginevra looked to Mrs.
Sclater.

"Gibbie wants me to go for a walk," she said.

"Certainly, my dear--if you are well enough to go with him," replied
her friend.

"I am always well," answered Ginevra.

"I can't go with you," said Mrs. Sclater, "for I expect my husband
every moment; but what occasion is there, with two such knights to
protect you?"

She was straining hard on the bit of propriety; but she knew them
all so well? she said to herself. Then first perceiving Gibbie's
design, Donal cast him a grateful glance, while Ginevra rose
hastily, and ran to put on her outer garments. Plainly to Donal,
she was pleased to go.

When they stood on the pavement, there was the moon, the very cream
of light, ladying it in a blue heaven. It was not all her own, but
the clouds about her were white and attendant, and ever when they
came near her took on her livery--the poor paled-rainbow colours,
which are all her reflected light can divide into: that strange
brown we see so often on her cloudy people must, I suppose, be what
the red or the orange fades to. There was a majesty and peace about
her airy domination, which Donal himself would have found difficult,
had he known her state, to bring into harmony with her aeonian
death. Strange that the light of lovers should be the coldest of
all cold things within human ken--dead with cold, millions of years
before our first father and mother appeared each to the other on the
earth! The air was keen but dry.