"I am hating that woman, Hamish," said she, "with her bravery and her beauty, and her charms that will be working backwards. . . ."
"Who was it that started these same spells?" says I. "Was it not in your mind to be trying these havers on Bryde yourself?"
"It was not in my mind that Helen Stockdale should be trying them on him," said she, "at any rate."
And at my laughing she left me in a pet, but not long after she would be telling me—
"There is something fine and brave about that woman, too, Hamish," she would say, "for she would be telling lies to Bryde McBride of what I had said about his going, and yet she told me all these lies. I could not be doing that," said Margaret. "No, I could not be owning to a thing like that—myself."
CHAPTER XXV.
I RIDE AGAIN TO McALLAN'S LOCKER.
There came a weariness of the spirit over me that long dreary winter, and all nature was there to be seconding my dismal thoughts. For months never did I awake but my first thought would be, "What is there not right?" and then I would be remembering that Bryde was not any more on the moorlands.
It seemed to me that always there was a drizzle of soft rain and a blanket of cold mist, that would be half hiding the friendly places, that the very hills were become the abode of strange uncanny beasts instead of decent ewes and fat wethers, and that the mists would be hiding the revels of the folk a man does not care to be speaking of. The trees would be dreary and sad—the sea always grey and gurly and ochone, the very roads had the look of bareness and emptiness, as though all a man's friends had marched over them, never to return.
Margaret, the Flower of Nourn, had taken to walking alone in the rain, under the trees by the burnside, or maybe I would be seeing her on the shore, and looking to the sea, and her songs were sad—ay, when she tried to be at her gayest. And once I am minding, when she was with me on the shore-head watching the men at the wrack-carting—