'Well, yes.'
'Never mind, Ellinor dear,' replied Mary; 'I always say, blessed be God for all His gifts,' she added, thinking of the legend over the old doorway.
CHAPTER VII.
DREAMS AND DOUBTS.
The sun of a soft and balmy summer afternoon was, as the song has it,
'Glinting bright
On Invermay's sweet glen and stream,'
on all the silver birches that grow thereby, on the rocky gullies through which the stream gurgles and babbles as it forces a passage towards the Earn, and on the green mound of the Holy Hill, of which its ceaseless current has swept so much away, when Mary Wellwood, alone, or attended only by her dog, and full of her own happy and innocent day-dreams, took a narrow path that leads northward down the side of the sylvan strath.
Her dress was plain, but fitted well her lithe and slender figure. She had on the daintiest of white cuffs and collar; a sunshade over her head lined with pink imparted to her soft face a glow that it did not naturally possess, and over her left arm were the two chaplets she and Ellinor had been so lately preparing.
No sound but the rustle of leaves and the twitter of birds broke the sunny stillness, till she eventually heard Jack, her fox-terrier, who was careering in front of her, barking and yelping with all the satisfaction of a joyous dog that has met with a friend, and almost immediately afterwards a turn of the rocky path brought her face to face with Captain Colville, who, rod in hand and basket on shoulder, had just quitted his fishing in the May after a satisfactory day's sport, and about whose well-gaitered legs Jack was leaping and bounding noisily.
'When Jack was here, I knew his mistress could not be far off,' said Colville, lifting his fly-garnished wideawake and presenting a hand with his brightest smile. 'You know the saw, Miss Wellwood, "Love me, love my dog," but it would seem that Jack loves me. And Jack is a travelled dog, I understand—one who has seen the world?'