“The Mearns!” said she. “Oh dear, oh dear! And you come frae the Meams!” She dropped into her Scots that showed her heart was true, and told me she had often had her May milk in my native parish.
“And you maybe know,” said she, flushing, “the toun of Glasgow, and the house of Walkinshaw, my—my father, there?”
I knew the house very well, but no more of it than that it existed.
It was in her eyes the tears were now, talking of her native place, but she quickly changed the topic ere I could learn much about her, and she guessed—with a smile coming through her tears, like a sun through mist—that I must have been in love and wandered in its fever, to be so far from home at my age.
“There was a girl,” I said, my face hot, my heart rapping at the recollection, and someway she knew all about Isobel Fortune in five minutes, while the others in the room debated on so trivial a thing as the songs of the troubadours.
“Isobel Fortune!” she said (and I never thought the name so beautiful as it sounded on her lips, where it lingered like a sweet); “Isobel Fortune; why, it's an omen, Master Greig, and it must be a good fortune. I am wae for the poor lassie that her big foolish lad”—she smiled with bewitching sympathy at me under long lashes—“should be so far away frae her side. You must go back as quick as you can; but stay now, is it true you love her still?”
The woman would get the feeling and the truth from a heart of stone; I only sighed for answer.
“Then you'll go back,” said she briskly, “and it will be Earn-side again and trysts at Ballageich—oh! the name is like a bagpipe air to me!—and you will be happy, and be married and settle down—and—and poor Clemie Walkinshaw will be friendless far away from her dear Scotland, but not forgetting you and your wife.”
“I cannot go back there at all,” I said, with a long face, bitter enough, you may be sure, at the knowledge I had thrown away all that she depicted, and her countenance fell.
“What for no'?” she asked softly.