Ferlie was going down the forest road to the shore to meet the fishermen. Long before he saw her Kingfisher heard her singing to herself and thought, for a little while, that it was Giri.
"Oh, ye'll tak the high road and I'll tak the low road,"
... and ever the last two lines filled the green gloom with haunting sorrow....
"But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond."
But there was no sorrow in Ferlie's face just then.
It was the little padre who wiped the joy out of it after he had seen Kingfisher.
* * * * * *
In a few moments everybody in the Settlement had collected round the two of them while the sun reached out long scarlet-sleeved arms through the plain glass window of the church and took St. Paul in a ruddy embrace.
The agent's face was grotesquely serious, thought Ferlie. No one could make her understand why for quite a long time.
It sounded so incredible—the thing they were telling her. A patch of colour from a boy's adventure book. That there existed a tribe of savages, within reach of a comparatively civilized Mission Settlement, whose hand was against every human being and against whom every man's hand was raised in enmity; that Kingfisher's trained sight had noticed signs of them along the shore in a vicinity to which they seldom came, and that Cyprian, ignoring Kingfisher's warning, had landed on that particular stretch of beach—this was the gist of it all.