And sitting there in dour silence, there came on me such a longing for Dan McBride that I could have wept. Eighteen years had I watched the ploughing and the harvesting, the cutting of the peats and the carting of hay, and never a word of Dan since the queer outlandish messenger carried my word to him to come home. The boys were grown men, the Laird and his Lady getting on in years, and the old folk going away with every winter, and never a word.
McGilp and his Seagull were not so often at the cove these last years, and yet McKinnon had a crack with him in Tiree, where he was buying a horse or two.
"Young Dan's deid," said McKinnon, "and Dol Beag will be hirpling aboot and eating his kail broth for many's the day."
There was one that never doubted—Belle, and after eighteen years she was little changed, a weary look sometimes in her eyes, for was she not like a wild thing chained, but more like a sister to Bryde than a mother.
And old Betty, Betty of eighty winters, sat by the fireside and would look at Bryde with her old, old eyes, hardly seeing, and whiles she would be calling the boy "Young Dan," and whiles havering of Miss Janet, his grandmother.
"You will be clever, clever," she would be saying to Belle, "and you will get another man yet. . . ."
And one night as I stood at the door—a clear night, I mind, with a harvest moon—"Hamish," said Belle, and her hand was at her heart, "I could go to him barefoot, for is he not always with me in the night?"
As I sat dreaming and listening in a kind of a way to the talk round me, it came on me that Margaret kept near to her mother, and once only did I see her look at Bryde, a hurried puzzled look,—but Hugh was ardent already, his face flushed and his laugh merry, and Mistress Helen was happy too.
There was the great struggling with our language, and she had a droll taking way of it that Hugh would be correcting in his college manner; but Bryde sat back, listening mostly, his face proud and swarthy in the shadows, and sometimes smiling to Mistress Helen, for her eyes would come back to him often.
When the moon was up, Bryde rose.