"No, tell me," she said.

"It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed, shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least, when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that was the very last of the army for me."

"I don't understand it," she said.

"Nor I," he confessed frankly; "only there's the fact! All I know is that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before, night and day."

"I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be the thing in actuality."

"I remember that too. _Dhe!_ how the whole thing comes back! I wonder--"

"Well!" she pressed.

"I wonder if we walked in the Duke's garden again, if we could restore the very feelings of that time--the innocence and ignorance of it?"

"I don't know that I want to do so," said she, laughing.

"Might we not----" He paused, afraid of his own temerity.

"Try it, you were going to say," she continued.

"You see I have little of your own gift. I'm willing. I am going to the town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not."

Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though she was saying "John Hielan'man, John Hielan'man!" to herself most of the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer--little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circ.u.mstances. He was a G.o.d-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.

They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the flowers grew thick on the d.y.k.es; the tall trees swayed their boughs: still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they were trying to recall.

"It is all just as it was," said she. "All just as it was; there are the very flowers I plucked," and she bent and plucked them again.

"We can never pluck our flowers twice," said he. "The flowers you gathered then are ghosts."

"Not a bit," said she. "Here they are re-born," and she went as before from bush to bush and bank to bank, humming a strain of sailor song.

They went under the trees on which he had fancied his heron's nest, and they looked at each other, laughing.

"Wasn't I a young fool?" he asked. "I was full of dream and conceit in those days."

"And now?" she asked, burying her face in the flowers and eyeing him wonderingly.

"Oh, now," said he, "I have lost every illusion." "Or changed them for others, perhaps." He started at the suggestion. "I suppose you are right, after all," he said. "I'm still in a measure the child of fancy.

This countryside moves me--I could tenant it with a thousand tales; never a wood or thicket in it but is full of song. I love it all, and yet it is my torture. When I was a child the Paymaster once got me on the bridge crying my eyes out over the screech of a curlew--that has been me all through life--I must be wondering at the hidden meanings of things. The wind in the winter trees, the gossip of the rivers, the trail of clouds, waves washing the sh.o.r.e at night--all these things have a tremendous importance to me. And I must laugh to see my neighbours making a to-do about a mercantile bargain. Well, I suppose it is the old Highlands in me, as Miss Mary says." "I have felt a little of it in a song," said Nan. "You could scarce do otherwise to sing them as you do,"

he answered. "I never heard you yet but you had the magic key for every garden of fancy. One note, one phrase of yours comes up over and over again that seems to me filled with the longings of thousand years."

He turned on her suddenly a face strenuous, eyes led with pa.s.sion.

"I wish! I wish!" said he all fervent, "I wish could fathom the woman within."

"Here she's on the surface," said Nan, a little impatiently, arranging her flowers. And then she looked him straight in the eyes. "Ladyfield seems a poor academy," she said, "if it taught you but to speculate on things unfathomable. I always preferred the doer to the dreamer. The mind of man is a far more interesting thing than the song of the river I'm thinking, or the trailing of mist. And woman----" she laughed and paused.

"Well?" He eyed her robust and wholesome figure.

"Should I expose my s.e.x, John Hielan'man, or should I not?" she reflected with an amused look in her face yet. "Never bother to look below the surface for us," she said. "We are better pleased, and you will speed the quicker to take us for what we seem. What matters of us is--as it is with men too--plain enough on the surface. Dear, dear! what nonsense to be on! You are far too much of the mist and mountain for me.

As if I had not plenty of them up in Maam! Oh! I grow sick of them!" She began to walk faster, forgetting his company in the sudden remembrance of her troubles; and he strode awkwardly at her heels, not very dignified, like a menial overlooked. "They hang about the place like a menace," said she. "No wonder mother died! If she was like me she must have been heart-broken when father left her to face these solitudes."

"It is so, it is so," confessed the lad. "But they would not be wearisome with love. With love in that valley it would smile like an Indian plain."

"How do _you_ ken?" said she, stopping suddenly at this.

"It would make habitable and even pleasant," said he, "a dwelling where age and bitterness had their abode."

"Faith, you're not so blate as I thought you!" she said, setting aside the last of her affected shy simplicity.

"Blate!" he repeated, "I would not have thought that was my failing. Am I not cracking away to you like an old wife?"

"Just to hide the blateness of you," she answered. "You may go to great depths with hills and heughs and mists--and possibly with women too when you get the chance, but, my dear Gilian, you're terribly shallow to any woman with an eye in her head."

"Did you say 'Gilian'?" he asked, stopping and looking at her with a high colour.

"Did I?" she repeated, biting her lips. "What liberty!"

"No, no," he cried----

"I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you object----"

He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him, and she laughed. All her a.s.surance was back to her, she knew the young gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.

"Well, well," she went on after a silence, "you seem poorly provided with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would be making love to me by this time."

He stared at her aghast. "But, but----"

"But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can a.s.sure you." This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the policies.

They reached the Lady's Linn, but did not repeat old history to the extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested it in a momentary boldness.

"No, no," said she. "We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson's.

And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram's stories here; what was it again?"

He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale's Daughter. She listened attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put into the narrative.

"It is a kind of gruesome fable," she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. "The other brother was Death, wasn't he? When you told it to me last I did not understand."

They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so bewildered them before: "After all, it is not a bit like what it was,"

said she. "I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time."

"Just so," he answered, "but you could see over no bushes in those days, and more's the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke's garden as well as in life, for it's only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan."

"Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John Hielan'man." But this was to herself.

"Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?"