“In yonder kirk mine enemies work my doom,” said I, pointing over the water, “and ere another sun rise I shall be no more minister of Balmaghie, but a homeless man, without either a rooftree or a reeking ingle. I have nothing to offer any woman. Why should I claim this day any woman’s love?”
“Ah,” she said, giving me the strangest look, “it is her hour. For if she loves you, she would fly to-day to share your dry crust, your sapless bite. See,” she cried, stretching out her hand with a large action, “if Mary Gordon loved a man, she would follow him in her sark to the world’s end. If so be his eyes had looked the deathless love into hers, his tongue told of love, love, only of love. Ah, that alone is worth calling love which feeds full on the scorns of life and grows lusty on black misfortune!”
“Lady Mary——” I began.
But she interrupted me, dashing her hand furtively to her face.
She pointed up towards the house of Drumglass.
“Yonder lies your way, Quintin MacClellan! Go to the woman you love—who loves you.”
She lifted the reins from the horse’s neck and would have started forward, but again I had gotten her hand. Yet I only bent and kissed it without word, reverently and sadly as one kisses the brow of the dead.
She moved away without anger and with her eyes downcast. But on the summit of a little hill she half turned about in her saddle and spoke a strange word.
“Quintin,” she said, “wherefore could ye not have waited? Wherefore kenned ye no better than to take a woman at her first word?”
And with that she set the spurs to her beast and went up the road toward the ford at the gallop, till almost I feared to watch her.