"I could always be wheedling him, Hamish," she laughed. At that I looked at her.
"I am thinking of Hugh," says she, "Hugh and Mistress Helen," but she had the grace to be shamed a little.
"Indeed," said Belle, "they are a bonny pair, the young Laird and the young lady. She will be riding here many times, for the Laird of Scaurdale will have been telling her old tales of the place."
"Will they be making a match of it?" said I.
"I am hoping that, Hamish," said Belle—"and, indeed, she is liking the hills and the folk, and fond of the horses too, and will be keen to be seeing Bryde breaking the young beasts, and watching him for long. She will whiles be putting the old tartan shawl round her."
At that Margaret went out of the house, and in a while I saw her with Bryde, walking step for step with him on the lea he was breaking, and her hand would sometimes be beside his on the stilt of the plough.
On the home road that day I would be showing her the road we had travelled that night of the whin-burning, and where in the hills was McAllan's Locker, and wondering what had come to the Killer, the dead white man. And I would be minding a story of a dog that howled in the night and slunk by in the darkness of Lag 'a bheithe, and I wondered if the Nameless Man had gone to his love that beckoned in the pool, or if the ravens had got him at the last of it, and if the pigeons built still away in the cranny of the Locker, and there was a sadness in me.
She had not been speaking, the lass beside me, and her merriness was all gone, for she was aye merry with Bryde, and at last—
"Hamish," said she, "there is something will happen."
And on top of my own mood I was startled, and the words did not come to me.