“Who in God's name said so?” asked he, looking over her shoulder deep into the little birch-wood, and then uneasy round about him.
“I guessed it,” said Marseli. “The kings of the land-fairies are by-ordinar big, and the dagger is ever on their hips.”
“Well, indeed,” said the little fellow, “to say I was king were a bravado, but I would not be just denying that I might be Prince.”
And that way their friendship began.
At the mouth of many nights when the fishing-boats were off at the fishing, or sometimes even by day when her father and her two brothers were chasing the signs of sea-pig and scart far down on Tarbert, Marseli would meet her fairy friend in a cunning place at the Black-water-foot, where the sea puts its arms well around a dainty waist of lost land. Here one can see Loch Finne from Ardno to Strathlachlan: in front lift the long lazy Cowal hills, and behind is Auchnabreac wood full of deer and birds. Nowadays the Duke has his road round about this cunning fine place, but then it lay forgotten among whins that never wanted bloom, and thick, soft, salty grass. Two plantings of tall trees kept the wind off, and the centre of it beaked in warm suns. It was like a garden standing out upon the sea, cut off from the throng road at all tides by a cluster of salt pools and an elbow of the Duglas Water.
Here the Sea-Fairy was always waiting for the girl, walking up and down in one or other of the tree clumps. He had doffed his fine clothes after their first meeting for plain ones, and came douce and soberly, but aye with a small sword on his thigh.
The girl knew the folly of it; but tomorrow was always to be the last of it, and every day brought new wonders to her. He fetched her rings once, of cunning make, studded with, stones that tickled the eye in a way the cairngorm and the Cromalt pearl could never come up to.
She would finger them as if they were the first blaeberries of a season and she was feared to spoil their bloom, and in a rapture the Sea-Fairy would watch the sparkle of eyes that were far before the jewels.
“Do your folk wear these?” she asked.
“Now and then,” he would say, “now and then. Ours is a strange family: to-day we may have the best and the richest that is going, to-morrow who so poor, without a dud to our backs and a mob crying for our heads?”