"A promise that is a lie," he said to himself bitterly. "Like the promises of men."
And then … to his startled fancies she had come into being like the rainbow, from nothingness … where the foot of the arch had appeared to rest stood the girl, Ygerne. A quarter of a mile between Drennen sitting here and her standing there, a stretch of boulder strewn mountain side separating them, God's covenant joining them. Drennen stiffened, started to his feet as though he had looked upon magic. At the foot of the rainbow not just gold … gold he had in plenty now … but a woman …
He laughed his old ugly laugh and settled back upon his rock, his eyes jerked away from her, sent back down the slope of the mountain to the green fringe of the Little MacLeod. He knew that his senses had tricked him as one's senses are so prone to do; that she had merely stepped into sight from behind a shoulder of blackened cliff; that the most brilliantly coloured rainbow is just so much sunlight and water. And he knew, too, that she would have to pass close to him on her way back to the Settlement unless she went to considerable effort to avoid him.
He saw her shadow upon a patch of snow in the trail where the rock protected it. He did not turn his head. He heard her step, knew when it had stopped and her shadow had grown motionless. She was not ten paces from him.
Stubbornly he ignored the silent challenge of her pausing. With slope shoulders he sat motionless upon his rock, his face turned toward the Little MacLeod, his freshly relighted pipe going calmly. Yet he was aware, both from the faint sound of her tread upon the soft ground and from her shadow, cast athwart the path, that she had come on another couple of steps, that she had stopped again, that her gaze was now no doubt concerned with his profile. He did not seek to make it the less harsh, to soften the expression of bitterness and uncouth hardness which his bit of a mirror had shown him in the dugout. He found that without turning to see he could remember just what her eyes looked like. And he had seen them only once and that when his chief concern was a bullet hole in his side.
While Drennen drew five or six slow puffs at his pipe neither he nor the girl moved. Then again she drew a pace nearer, again stopped. He sent his eyes stubbornly up and down the willow fringed banks of the Little MacLeod. His thought, used to obeying that thing apart, his will, concerned itself with the question of just where the gold seekers were driving their fools' search for his gold.
Stubbornness in the man had met a stubbornness no less in the girl. Though his attitude might not be misread she refused to heed it. He had half expected her to go on, and was idly looking for a shrug of the shadow's shoulders and then a straightening of them as she went past; he half expected her to address him with some commonplace remark. He had not thought to have her stand there and laugh at him.