'Ah—but you must,' pleaded his sister, 'for mother would never have you left upon the dyke your lone, and father wants me.' But Jacky paid no heed.
'I'll have to come and pull you down,' said Alison, rashly going nearer.
'Ye'll no!' said Jacky, with a deft swirl of his whip. It cracked like a pistol shot on the silent summer air, and the tip of the lash caught Alison on the ear, so that she clapped her hand to the place with a little cry of pain.
'Ah, Jacky,' she cried, 'you've hurt me now.' But Jacky—a fiendish, little, spoilt wretch—only laughed.
Nemesis, however, hovered behind him, for there had been an unsuspected witness to the scene. A gentleman on horseback had come down the road which passed close to the new wall, and, attracted by the repeated cracking of a whip, had paused. Finally he had dismounted, tied his horse to a gate-post, and, standing a little way off from the end of the unfinished dyke, could see and hear what happened both above and below. While Alison, the tears of her smart in her eyes, still expostulated vainly with her brother, she was suddenly electrified to perceive his ankles clasped by two hands from the other side of the wall. With a sharp howl of terror, the heir of all the Grahams disappeared abruptly from his perch. Alison ran round the dyke, and lo! with the roaring Jacky struggling in his arms, there was Archibald Herries, or his ghost.
Alison stopped dead, and the two, with eight years between them of pain, and parting, and estrangement, stood staring at each other—so strange is human life—upon the verge of laughter. Herries released the boy, who ran yelling to the house, and then, flushed and awkward, he stood before Alison.
'I—I am come to The Mains, you see,' he stammered, not brilliantly, it must be confessed.
'I see, sir,' said Alison, a little giddily. (How sweet, how strong—too strong—the pinks smelt in her dress!) 'But you are like to have an odd welcome,' she went on, in a queer, steady voice, and yet with a little uncertain laugh, 'if you begin like this, by beating Jacky. 'Tis a providence has sent my mother from home this day, or you would be like to get into her black books.'
The summer world, the trees, the sky were reeling round her, but she kept her head, better, indeed, than did the man. He, dumb, stood looking at her, while the world, his world, changed round him, like the world of dreams. What had he expected to see?—a faded woman past her prime? Alison was twenty-eight now, but at twenty-eight, young women living quiet country lives are neither old nor faded as a common rule. She was a girl yet, the flush of summer on her cheeks, not the tendril of a curl changed; bewitching womanliness was in the sweet curves of her young body beneath the cotton gown. Her eyes seemed larger than of yore, perhaps because the face had fined away a little from mere girlish chubbiness to slightly hollower lines of cheek and chin. Her soft, broad forehead knit itself a little. Herries felt his heart go from him, and his cool head swam. He tried to keep command of himself, but himself—the self of all these barren years—was slipping from him even now.
'Can I—can I have a few words with you alone?' he asked humbly.