After a few minutes of this climbing, Margaret suddenly moved to one side, and sprang down to a tiny morsel of gravelly beach, at the side of the burn. I followed her, and was fairly entranced by what I saw. A little way above us the gorge widened, allowing us to see the trees, which, growing on either side of the brook, interlaced their branches above it. From beneath the trees the stream made a clear downward leap, of perhaps thirty or forty feet, into a pool—the pool at our feet—which was so deep that it seemed nearly as black as ink. The music of the waterfall filled the air so that we could hardly catch the sound of each other’s words; and if we moved to the farther end of the little margin of beach, we heard, instead of the noise of the waterfall, the sweet babbling of the burn over its stony bed.
‘Do you often come here?’ I asked, as we stood at the edge of the stream, some little distance from the fall.
‘Yes, pretty often when I wish to be alone, or to have an hour’s quiet reading.’
‘As you do to-day,’ said I; ‘that’s as much as to say that you want to have an hour’s quiet reading now.’
‘So I do,’ said the girl calmly.
‘Or, in other words, that it is time for me to take myself off.’
‘I did not mean that,’ said Margaret, with perfect placidity. ‘Would you like to go up to the top of the linn?’
‘Very much,’ said I, and we scrambled up the bank to the upper level of the stream, and gazed down upon the black rushing water and the dark pool beneath, with its fringe of cream-coloured foam.
‘So this is the “Lover’s Leap,”’ I remarked.
‘Yes,’ said Margaret. ‘They say that once a young man was carrying off his sweetheart, when her father and brothers pursued them. The girl was riding on a pillion behind her lover. As the only way of escape, he put his horse at the gap over our heads—it must have been narrower in those days than it is now—missed it, and both himself and the lady were killed in the fall.’