My sad thoughts and the noise of the breakers so much absorbed me that I felt conscious of nothing so much as my utter loneliness. But as I stood there in my wretchedness, suddenly a hand was laid gently on my shoulder, and I looked round, to see Thora at my side, with a great cloak thrown about her, and her hair streaming in the wind.
"Halcro," she said, "it is not this way I can see you turned from my father's door in the rain and the wind, and with that wound in your foot. Pm sorry he spoke to you like that, for I'm sure you'll be tired and weary.
"I have brought you some oatcake--see. Eat it, while I mend your foot."
Then she knelt down before me on the wet, mossy rock, took a piece of clean linen from under the cloak that covered her, and wiped clean my wound. With her fingers she gently drew over the torn skin, and taking another piece of white cloth bandaged it neatly round my ankle.
While she was so employed I informed her of my fight with the otter and the loss of my dog, and her gentle sympathy was sweet to my troubled spirit. And then I told her where she might find the otter's skin, and how she should make use of it.
"There, now," she said, putting a pin through the bandage and rising to her feet, "that will serve till you get home."
"It's real kind of you to do this for me, Thora," I said, touched by the girl's tenderness, "and I will not forget this. No, not as long as I live;" and I think there was a tremor in my voice--at least I felt what I said.
"But," I continued, "what will they say to you at Crua Breck, if they hear you have done this thing?"
"Halcro, I have done nothing but what I have been told to do. Before you knocked at the door, my father was saying we should aye 'do as we'd be done by.' In that I have obeyed him. But I must run back now, or they will miss me. See you give care to the foot. Fare ye well!"
And with that she hastened back to the farm, leaving me to ponder over her manner of applying that golden rule which her father had, while teaching it, so grievously failed to practise.