A quite dispassionate dissector of the emotions and their origins might have come to the conclusion that it was, after all, only a case of the heart performing its natural function of feeding the brain. For the heart is the life.
She laughed at herself; but the herd-laddie remained in her thoughts, and one day, before she went south, she actually found herself sitting on that very same piece of rock where she had sat ten years before, and in imagination he sat on the adjacent rock, munching his thick oatcake and broken pieces of cheese.
"What a greedy little pig I was!" she said to herself, as she sat leaning forward with her chin in her hand. "But I don't believe he'd have taken a bite from me, however much I'd wanted him to."
She looked at the slab where the windmill had been, and at the pool where the gentleman had washed. He looked as if he had been strenuously washing ever since. What a radiant face he had! It did not come from much washing, she knew; but somehow the two things linked themselves in her mind. It was the white fire inside that lit up the outside: a real man—a man to trust infinitely—a man to——
She sat looking out over the mighty panorama of hills and lochs and mountains opposite—"Gare Loch, Loch Goil, Loch Long, Ben Lomond, Ben Ihme, The Cobbler, Holy Loch." She knew most of them still. How the sight of them all brought him back to her! And, in all probability, he would never see them again. "We are going among perilous peoples."
Well! he had done very wonderfully; he was fulfilling the highest aspirations of his boyish heart.
And she? She was a lady, and very rich, as she had said she would be. And she remembered the touch of scorn with which the herd-laddie had said, "Yes, that's about all you can be, I suppose."
Close behind her the swift brown waters of the Cut hurried headlong to the town—one long, unceasing blessing. "Men may come and men may go, but we go on for ever," sang the bubbling waters against the rough rock walls of their narrow way.
"Surely I am one of the most useless of God's creatures," said Jean Arnot, as she wandered slowly back towards the paper-mill and home.