On a summer morning that was, with the heat-haze hardly lifted and long slender threads of spider webs clinging to the leaves of the birches by the burnside, and the bracken green and strong, with the white cuckoo spittals on them that will leave a mark like froth on the knees of a horse. To the pebbly ford above the "Waulk Mill" came Bryde, riding loosely with slack rein, for he was thinking much these days. In the burn his horse halted to drink, and then rested a little from the water—his head high and his ears forward—Bryde looking to his path for the South End, for he was on some errand of grazing beasts. Then there came that fine sound, the distant neigh of a horse, and the horse in the burn answered gallantly, and came splashing on, passaging and side-stepping a little, with curved crest. And there by the burnside they met, Bryde and Helen.
Their words at the meeting were formal enough, for there were houses at a little distance from the crossing; but you will only be seeing the founds of them now, and the plum-trees gone to wood, and the straggling hawthorns and the heather growing to the very burnside by the Lagavile.[1] But at the meeting there was a rich glowing colour in the face of the maid, and her lips were parted in a little smile, and her great eyes, sombre often, but now alight with love a-laughing in them, rested on the man like a caress.
"Ha, well met, my swarthy dragoon," said she, "or are we sailors this merry morning?"
"There's aye the night for dreams, Mistress Helen, but in the daytime I will be but a plain farming body, concerned about bestial. . . ."
"Bestial," quo' she, as they rode in the old track by the burnside that you'll see yet from the other road, "my horse is a-lathered, and I too am concerned about bestial. We will let us down," said she, "in the shade yonder, and rest the horses, and be good farmers together—yes?"
Bryde slacked the girths and tied the horses, and then joined the lass on a little mound of green like a couch.
"And now," cried Helen Stockdale—"now, sir, here are we in the green wood with neither page nor groom—squire and dame—and I am loving it," said she, and her little brown capable hand took one of his great hard ones.
[1] Laga vile=hollow of the tree.
"You have fine hands, M'sieu Bryde," said she, her fingers over his to be comparing them, "great and strong and well-tried."
And there fell a silence between them, and as both strove to break that silence their eyes met, and there came a quick changing of colour on the face of Helen, and Bryde's hand closed over hers. And as she sat by his side her eyes lowered, and the curling lashes sweeping her cheek, it came to the man how very beautiful she was, her pride all forgotten. He felt her hand trembling in his, and then she raised her head with a questioning little sound at her lips, and looked at him, and smiled, pouting.