“He’s honoured in your interest, madam,” I could not refrain from saying, my attempt at raillery I fear a rather forlorn one.
She flushed at this, but said never a word, only biting her nether lip and fondling the child.
I think we put together a cautious little fire and cooked some oats from my dorlach, though the ecstasy of the meeting with the girl left me no great recollection of all that happened. But in a quiet part of the afternoon we sat snugly in our triangle of fir roots and discoursed of trifles that had no reasonable relation to our precarious state. Betty had almost an easy heart, the child slept on my comrade’s plaid, and I was content to be in her company and hear the little turns and accents of her voice, and watch the light come and go in her face, and the smile hover, a little wae, on her lips at some pleasant tale of Mover’s.
“How came you round about these parts?” she asked—for our brief account of our doings held no explanation of our presence in the wood of Strongara.
“Ask himself here,” said John, cocking a thumb over his shoulder at me; “I have the poorest of scents on the track of a woman.”
Betty turned to me with less interest in the question than she had shown when she addressed it first to my friend.
I told her what the Glencoe man had told the parson, and she sighed. “Poor man!” said she, “(blessing with him!) it was he that sent me here to Strongara, and gave me tinder and flint.”
“We could better have spared any of his friends, then,” said I. “But you would expect some of us to come in search of you?”
“I did,” she said in a hesitancy, and crimsoning in a way that tingled me to the heart with the thought that she meant no other than myself. She gave a caressing touch to the head of the sleeping child, and turned to M’Iver, who lay on his side with his head propped on an elbow, looking out on the hill-face.
“Do you know the bairn?” she asked.