’Twas Dreghorn brought the news to Manor—the ancient wooer. Wanlock broke a bottle of wine and made the occasion festival, but Mirren could not be discovered.
Full of his plans, her father went that evening to her chamber at an hour when she should be bedded, and found with apprehension that although the door was barred the chamber held no tenant. He went outside in darkness lashed by rain, and to her open window: made his way within—and found the brooch upon her unpressed pillow! It caught a flicker from the fire and shot a lance of light across the room.
“My God!” cried Wanlock harshly, “oh, my God! is this himself, Mahoun?” and with the jewel burning in his loof, he turned to see his daughter, with a face of shame and fear, framed in the open window. She had, in other hours, a sweetness and a charm like sunny Highland weather, or like the little lone birds of the sea, or like an air of youth remembered; but now arising from the outer night of misty exhalations, pallid against the background of the Manor trees, she seemed a blameful ghost.
He dragged her to his feet: as she knelt and cowered, he stamped with brutal passion on her fingers.
“Where have ye been?”
Her gallant spirit plucked her back from the edge of swound to which his cruel act had brought her: she looked without a tremor in his face, and the third blow fell when she told him she had been to Mellish.
“Mellish!” he cried aghast, “and, madam, what in the name of God have you to do with Mellish? He gave you this?” And he pressed with a brutal thumb the fateful gem against her parted lips so sore it seemed to shed its juices like a berry.
“I love him, and he has long loved me, and—”
“What! and there was the Glasfurd woman!”
“He had never loved her, or only thought so at the first, and the freedom she has given him has more than made amends for his poverty. Father, I am going to marry him.”