ht them there then, had brought
also this happy meeting. It was a picture I would be aye wishing I
could be painting--Belle, her dark face flushed, her eyes suffused, the
pride, the love, the longing of her, and her hands twisting and
clasping, and her lips trembling, without words coming to them. The
heaving breast and the little flutter at the delicate nostril, what man
can be telling of these things; and Dan, his brows pulled down, and the
scar red on his cheek, and his arms half outstretched--Dan took his
woman into his arms as a man lifts a wean, and I saw his head bend to
her face, and the wild clasp of her arms round him, and her lips
parting as she raised them to his.

I did a daftlike thing then, for I put the saddle on the great
horse--and he was a mettle beast, with many outlandish capers--and I
rode through the hill to the kirk, and left word that the minister
would be doing well to ceilidh at the house on the moor.

And indeed it was well on in the afternoon when that grave man
dismounted a little stiffly from his pony, and I made bold to search
for Dan and Belle, and tell my errand. It would maybe be a chancy
business, but these two were like bairns then--and on the doorstep they
were married. And when the minister's little pony was on its road
home, and the sun still red to the west, and we three still standing at
the door, Belle with with her two hands on Dan's arm, said he--

"I had clean forgot, my dear, but Hamish would always be remembering
the due observances o' the sacraments."

A wedding, it seems to me, will be waking the devil of speech in all
women, and old Betty would be havering like all that.

"What would I be telling ye?" she would say. "Has he not had the wale
of all the weemen, and never the wan could be keeping him but you. And
you a young thing yet--there will be time for a scroosch of weans; it
is Betty that kens, and Bryde the lad will be daidlin' his brother on
his knee.

"Ye could have been waiting," says she, "till the lad would be home,
and standing under his mother's shawl before the minister, but ye would
be that daft to be at the marrying--hoot, toot."

* * * * * *

Dan came back to his farming as a boy returns to his play, and it was
droll whiles at the head-rig to see him straighten his back from the
plough stilts, with also a quick far-seeing look to right and left of
him, and an upward tilt to his chin that brought back the sold