“Mune-rise? I’fegs, lad, she’ll do’t very weel wi’ oot ye, I’m thinkin’!”
“Aye, but I’m minded to dream awhile, Hector; the moon ever stirs my imagination——”
“Hoot-toot! De’il awa’ wi’ y’r dreamin’ an’ imaginationin’! ’Tis mysel’ wad tak’ ye for a puir, moonstruck daftie if I didna ken ye for John Dering and son o’ your father!”
“If,” sighed Sir John, “if, Hector, you could suggest an apt rhyme for ‘soul,’ now, I should take it kindly ... though, to be sure, ‘dole’ might do at a pinch.”
“Umph-humph!” snorted General Sir Hector MacLean, and urged his horse on down the hill.
Being alone, Sir John dismounted, and tethering his animal, seated himself on grassy bank and gave himself up to introspective reverie.
The awesome, brooding stillness, the splendour of the rising moon, the mystery of the surrounding landscape, and all the magic of this early midsummer night wrought in him a pensive melancholy, a growing discontent of himself and the latter years, and he luxuriated in a consciousness of his infinite unworthiness.
Thus, with wistful gaze upon the full-orbed moon, Sir John had already mentally forsworn the world, the flesh and the devil, when he was roused suddenly by a rustling of leaves near by and the sharp crack of a dried twig; next moment he was beside his horse and had whipped forth, cocked and levelled one of his travelling pistols.
“Qui va la?” he demanded, and then in English: “Come out! Show yourself, or I fire!”
“Don’t!” cried a voice. “Don’t!” The leaves parted suddenly, and Sir John beheld a woman within a yard of him; majestically tall she was, and muffled in the long folds of a coarse cloak, beneath whose shadowy hood he glimpsed the pale oval of a face and a single strand of curling hair darkly innocent of powder.