"I always like weeds best, but I daren't tell my Aunties that," he said.
He was much more at his ease here up on the hills, and he looked very fine too, with the sleeves rolled back from his strong brown arms, and his bare head covered with thick wavy hair. If he wore the kind of clothes that Wallace Sutherland wore, Christina could not help thinking he would be quite as handsome.
"I like weeds," he was saying, "though they do give a great deal of trouble. This bind weed now. It is such a plague but I feel sorry every time I destroy it."
He pulled a long graceful branch with its exquisite pink blossoms and Christina put out her hand for it. And Gavin was emboldened to gather a little blossom of the blue jay and hand it to her shyly. He wanted to tell her that the fire-weed was like her cheeks and the blue jay like her eyes, but he could not. He knew Christina's ambition, and he was too proud to play the lover when he was not wanted.
But he walked by her side, across the Slash, and Christina felt that old sense of happy companionship in his presence. The berries were fairly falling off the branches in ripe luxuriance, and they filled the little pail she had brought in quite too short a time. Behind them the top of Craig-Ellachie stretched up to catch the last light of the setting sun. Her home fields spread out beneath; the dusk laying its velvet cloak softly over them. The air was so still, the sound of the horses being driven to the water trough came up from the barnyard.
And then there came across the rose-touched hills a new sound, the dull throb of a drum.
"What is that?" asked Christina.
They stood side by side and listened, looking in the direction of the town, where now the electric lights glowed against the sky. The sound came from the great outside world like the pulse beat of another life, the life into which Christina was longing to plunge.
"Maybe it's about the war," said Gavin; he suddenly raised his head and his eyes grew bright. "Perhaps it means that England is in it."
"Oh," Christina looked at him surprised. "It would be awful if the Old Country got into it," she exclaimed. "Surely they won't."