And now, too, the country began to show more of its true character. Its little lochs—a great chain of them—dashed upon their vision in patches of blue or grey or yellow. The valley was speckled with the tarns. Gilian forgot the hazards of the enterprise and the discomforts to be faced; he had no time to think of what was to be done next for them in their flight, so full was he with the romance of those multitudinous lakelets lost in the empty and sunny wilds, some with isle, all with shelving heathery braes beside them, or golden bights where the little wave lapped. He turned to his companion with an ecstasy.
“Did you ask me if I rued it?” he said. “Give me no better than to stay here for ever—with you to share it.”
She met his ardour with coolness. “I wish you had been so certain of that a little ago,” she said; “you seem very much on the swither. Have you thought of what’s to be done next? It is all very well to be putting our backs to the angry Elasaid behind us there, but all the time I’m wondering what’s to be the outcome.”
He confessed himself at a loss. She eyed him without satisfaction. This young gentleman, who seemed so enchanting in circumstances where no readiness of purpose was needed, looked very inadequate in the actual stress of things, in the broad daylight, his flat bonnet far back on his brow, his face wan, his plaid awry. And there was something in his carriage of the ridiculous lantern that made her annoyed at herself for some reason.
She stopped, and they hung hesitating, with the lapwings crying about them, and no other sound in the air.
“I’m going back,” said she, as if she meant it. His face fell. This time there was no mistaking his distress.
“No, no, you cannot, Nan,” he said. “We will get out of it somehow; you cannot return, and what of me? It would be ill to explain.”
“We’re neither whaup nor deer,” said she, shrugging her shoulders, “to live here wild the rest of our days.”
Gilian looked about him rather helplessly, and he started at the sight of a gable wall, with what in a shealing might pass for a window in it, and he knew it for a relic of the old days, when the moor in its levels here would be spotted with happy summer homes, when the people of Lochow came from the shores below and gave their cattle the juicy grazing of these untamed pastures, themselves living the ancient life, with singing and spinning in the open, gathering at nights for song or dance and tale in the fine weather.
“There’s something of shelter at least,” he said, pointing to it. She looked dubiously at the dry-stone walls almost tumbling, the cabars of what had been a byre fallen over half the interior, and at the rank nettles—head-high almost—about the rotten door.