He sat upright and looked. “Is it?” he answered. “Will you take me there to-morrow? I have always wanted to see the place.”
“Would you like to go early in the morning? The mist is more likely to be there then, as it was that day. It is so mysterious and beautiful. Would you like to do that?” I asked him.
“Better than anything else!” he said. “Yes, let us go in the morning.”
“Wee Brown Elspeth seems very near me this evening,” I said. “I feel as if—” I broke off and began again. “I have a puzzled feeling about her. This afternoon I found some manuscript pushed behind a book on a high shelf in the library. Angus said he had hidden it there because it was a savage story he did not wish me to read. It was the history of the feud between Ian Red Hand and Dark Malcolm of the Glen. Dark Malcolm’s child was called Wee Brown Elspeth hundreds of years ago—five hundred, I think. It makes me feel so bewildered when I remember the one I played with.”
“It was a bloody story,” he said. “I heard it only a few days before we met at Sir Ian’s house in London.”
That made me recall something.
“Was that why you started when I told you about Elspeth?” I asked.
“Yes. Perhaps the one you played with was a little descendant who had inherited her name,” he answered, a trifle hurriedly. “I confess I was startled for a moment.”
I put my hand up to my forehead and rubbed it unconsciously. I could not help seeing a woesome picture.
“Poor little soul, with the blood pouring from her heart and her brown hair spread over her dead father’s breast!” I stopped, because a faint memory came back to me. “Mine,” I stammered—“mine—how strange!—had a great stain on the embroideries of her dress. She looked at it—and looked. She looked as if she didn’t like it—as if she didn’t understand how it came there. She covered it with ferns and bluebells.”