“Are you vexed you have come?” he asked, stopping and turning on her his yet wan face full of regret and of dubiety too.
“The thing is done,” she answered abruptly, and they were stepping carefully over the burn that ran about its boulders in the dark, gurgling. “Are you sure you are not sorry yourself?”
“I am not a bit sorry,” he said, “but—but——”
“Your ‘buts’ are too late, Gilian,” she went on firmly. “If you rued the enterprise now, I would go myself.” But she relaxed some of the coldness of her mood as he shifted his lantern to the other hand and put a bashful but firm and supporting hand below her arm to secure her footing in the rough ascent. This was a little more like what she had expected, she told herself, though she missed something of warmth in the action. How could she tell that the hand that held her was trembling with passion, that her shawl fringe as it was blown across his face by the breeze was something he could have kissed rapturously?
And now they were well up the hillside. The house of Maam, the garden, the plantings, the noisy river, were down in the valley, all surrendered to the night. Their lantern, swinging on the lad’s finger, threw a path of light before them, showing the short cropped grass, the rushy patches, or the gall they trod odorously, or the heather in its rare clumps. No sound came louder than the tumbling waters; their voices, as they spoke even yet guardedly as people will in enterprises the most solitary when their consciences are unresting, seemed strange and unfamiliar to each other.
Soon they were on the summit of the hill range and below them lay the two glens, and the first breath of the morning came behind from Strone, where dawn threw a wan grey flag across the world. They plunged into the caldine trees of Strongara, sped fast across Aray at Three Bridges, and the dawn was on Balantyre, where the farm-touns high and low lay like thatched forts, grey, cold, unwelcoming in the morning, with here and there a stream of peat reek from the greasach of the night’s fires. They became, as it might be, children again as they hastened through the country. He lost all his diffident dubiety and was anew the bold adventurer, treading loverlike upon the very stars. A passion of affection was on him; he would take her unresisting hand and lead her as though she were his, really, and before them was their moated castle. And Nan forgot herself in the fresh zest of the dewy morning that now was setting the birds to their singing in the dens that hang above the banks of the Balantyre burn.
A rosy flush came to the hills where on the upper edges spread the antlers of deer sniffing the wind, rejoicing in the magnificence of the fine highland country in its autumn time. Nan hummed and broke into a strain of the verse of Donacha Ban that chants the praise of day and deer-hunting; she charmed her comrade; he felt the passion of the possessor and stopped and turned upon her and made to kiss. She laughed temptingly, drew back, warding her lips with the screen that now she had arranged in a new and pleasing fashion on her shoulders so that she looked some Gaelic huntress of the wilds. “So, so, Gilian!” said she, “you have found that there might be more in the books than simply to take the girl away with not so much as ‘Have you a mouth?’ when she stepped out at the window.”
“What a fool I was!” he cried. “I was thinking of it all the time, but did not dare.” But awakened to the actuality of what he now had dared, he was ashamed to go further.
Nan laughed. He looked odd indeed standing facing her with the lantern burning yet in his hand though the day was almost wide-awake. He was a poet bearing his own light about the world extravagantly while the sun was shining for common mortals.
“Out with your light!” said she. And then she added: “If you dared not do it in the dark when you met me first, you cannot do it now,” and he was dashed exceedingly. He puffed out the flame.