For her life she could not but recall the other—the more confident and practised one she had fled from. She drew off, red, to give her no more than her due, for the treachery of her mind.
“Leave it,” she said to him. “I will get it myself. Does anyone besides Miss Mary know we are here?”
“No.”
“Then she will tell nobody our secret. You will go down now. We could scarcely go together. You will go down now, and tell her I will follow in the dusk.”
“You have given me no answer, Nan,” he pleaded; “the heather!”
“The heather will be at my heart!” she cried hurriedly.
It was a promise that sang in his head as he went on his way, the herald of joy, the fool of illusion.
CHAPTER XXXIV—CHASE
When he had gone and was no farther than the shoulder of the brae lying between the hut and Little Fox, and there was no longer any chance of his turning to repeat his wild adieux, Nan went into the old hut and put the sprig of white heather at her bosom, and gave way to a torrent of tears. She could not have done so in the sunshine outside, but in that poor interior, even with the day spying through the roof, she had the sense of seclusion. She cried for grief and bitterness. No folly she had ever committed seemed so great as this her latest, that she should blindly have fled from a danger unmeasured into a situation that abounded with difficulties. She blamed herself, she blamed her father, she blamed Gilian for his inability to be otherwise than God had made him. In contrast to his gawky shyness—the rusticity of the farm and hill, rose up constant in her remembrance the confident young gentleman she had run away from without so much as a knowledge of his name. She cried, and the afternoon came, a blush of fire and flowing gold upon the hills, the purple of the steeps behind her darkened; upon Big Fox behind, some wild duck floated and gossiped.