The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the sea moaning in the trees behind the town.
“What—what—what are we here for?” said he, beholding for the first time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and sensitive a dame.
She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!
“You may well ask,” she said, moving away from that alluring house-front with its inmates so indifferent to the passions in the dark without And her sobs were not yet finished. “Because I prize my brothers,” said she, “and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead companion’s child?” She hurried her pace away from that house whose windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.
“Do you like that girl?” said she.
“I like her—when she sings,” said he.
“Oh! it was always that,” she went on helplessly “My poor brothers! They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that brought them together.” Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful exclamation: “Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing here with you? She may have her mother’s nature as well as her mother’s songs.”
For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the street, now deserted but for themselves and a man’s footsteps sounding on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming. It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.
“It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell,” he said, in a shrill high dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the guttural Highland burghers.
She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.