At the first wail of the pipes the blood of her ancestors sprang to her face. She clasped her hands together, listening in silence to the barbaric music, her lips apart, her eyes aglow. And all this for the call of the pipes! Not yet had she caught her first glimpse of the pipers; but an instant later the tall figures came swinging proudly into sight, plaids swaying like tartan tassels, kilts moving with that wave-about-to-break rhythm given to their garments only by inspired pipers.
Even I felt a thrill as if each nerve in my body were a string drawn suddenly taut, but I was gloomily conscious that the Celtic souls of Somerled and Barrie felt more than I was capable of feeling, a mysterious something which drew the two together at this instant. Physically, I stood between them, but I knew that my body was no obstacle to the lightning flash between their spirits.
Not a word said one of us as the goodly company of soldiers swept by in a rich-coloured cloud of their own music. But when all had disappeared into the church, Somerled and Barrie looked at each other. His eyes praised her for a braw and bonnie lassie who had responded in fine style to her first-heard pipes, her first-seen kilt; yet his lips had nothing to say but, "Well, what do you think of them?"
"Think?" echoed Barrie. "I think it's perfectly unbelievable how any girl can ever marry a man who isn't a Highlander and has no right to the kilt!"
There was one for Somerled and one against me; but it only got my blood up. Many a girl says a certain thing, and does another when her time comes.
"If I were rich," she went on, "I'd live in a castle in the Highlands, and I'd have it full, simply swarming, with pipers, playing me awake in the morning and to sleep at night."
"I should like you to see your own castle of Dunelin at Dhrum. There are plenty of pipers there. I've kept them all on, meaning them to play for me some day," said Somerled, who had just then forgotten, I think, the existence of myself and Mrs. James, and failed to observe that in the distance all Miss Barribel MacDonald's missing young men were assembling, as if to the call of the blood—the soldier from Carlisle, who had collected a friend, and the American contingent of four.
"My own castle?" Barrie repeated.
"You know what I mean. It would be yours if you'd been a boy. As you aren't——"
"It's yours!" laughed she.