Scarce understanding yet, she turned from the bog-side with a sigh that was half-impatient, and crossed to the kirk which was land-mark and trysting-place in one. They counted the square-towered church at Marshcotes old; yet it was young compared with this rounded pile of stones which was sacred to the oldest-born of all religions. Hither the hill-lassies came on Mickaelmas Eve to ask if they would be wedded before the year was out, and to glean from the silent stone an answer prompted of desire; here, too, sweethearts half confessed found wit to tell each other what many a summer's field-walk after milking had failed to render clear, and grown men, who had come in jest, had stayed to wonder at the power the old place had to stir a laggard tongue. This Wynyates Kirk, at which Pagan mothers had once worshipped lustily, seemed still to have its message for the moor folk; and the way of a man with a maid, which it had watched for generations out of mind, showed constantly the same.
The compulsion of the past was strong on Janet, as she stood under shadow of the rounded stone and strained her eyes toward the track which should be leading Shameless Wayne to her. She had lived with the wind for comrade and the voices of the heath for bed-fellows; there had been none to keep her mind from Nature's lesson to its children, and here, with the ghosts of long-dead love vows plaining from the heather that hugged the kirk-stone foot, her heart went out once and for all to Shameless Wayne. The spirit of the place quickened in her, telling her that neither kinship nor any reek of feud could come between herself and Wayne; for love was real up here, while pride of family went fluttering like a thistle-seed down the rude pathway of the wind.
"He's a laggard—a laggard!" she cried. "Ah, if he knew what I am keeping from him——"
She stopped, and the wind grew colder, so it seemed. How if the Lean Man had changed his path? How if he had met Wayne by the way and given him that which would render him a laggard till the Trump of Doom? Again she strained her eyes across the peat, and far down the moor she saw a sturdy, loose-limbed figure stride up toward her.
Nearer and nearer the figure came, and the girl laughed low to herself. Standing with one arm on the stone, she looked down at Shameless Wayne and waited. And many a dark matter came clear to her in that moment, as she marked the lines of trouble in his face; nor could she tell which was the stronger—the shyness that knowledge of her self-surrender brought, or the fierce, protective impulse that bade her fight his troubles for him.
"So you've kept tryst, Janet? I scarce looked for it," he said gravely.
"Is it my wont, Ned, to break tryst?" she answered.
"Nay, but last night has changed all—for you and me."
His coldness jarred on her, after her late eagerness toward him.
"Art chill as this rainy sky, Ned," she said. "Is't because I have looked askance at thee of late that thou giv'st me you for the old thou of friendship?"