Sometimes Mary would raise her eyes and catch him looking at her—that was all. And more often she was conscious of his grave staid regard when she did not look up. At first it fretted her a little. For, of course, she could never love again—never believe any man's word. Life was ended for her—ended at nineteen! So at least Mary McArthur told herself.
But all the same, there—a pillar for support, a buckler for defence, was Alexander McQuhirr, strong, undemonstrative, dependable. One day she had cut her finger, and he was rolling it up for her daintily as a woman. They were alone in the shearing field together. Alexander had the lint and the thread in his pocket. So, indeed, he anticipated her wants silently all his life.
It had hurt a good deal, and before he had finished the tears stood brimming in her eyes.
"I think you must get tired of me. I bring all my cut fingers to you, Alec!" she said, looking up at him.
He gave a kind of gasp, as if he were going to say something, as a single drop of salt water pearled itself and ran down Mary's cheek; but instead he only folded the lint more carefully in at the top, and went on rolling the thread round it.
"She is learnin' to love me!" he thought, with some pleasure, but he was too bashful and diffident to take advantage of her feeling. He contented himself with making her life easier and sweeter in that hard upland cantonment of more than military discipline, from whose rocky soil Yabel and his sons dragged the bare necessities of life, as it were, at the point of the bayonet.
All the time he was thinking hard behind his broad forehead, this quiet Alexander McQuhirr. He was the third son. His father was a poor man. He had nothing to look for from him. In time Tom would succeed to the farm. It was clear, then, that if he was ever to be anything, he must strike out early for himself. And, as many a time before and since, it was the tears in the eyes of a girl that brought matters to the breaking point.
Yes, just the wet eyes of a girl—that is, of Mary McArthur, as she looked up at him suddenly in the harvest-field among the serried lines of stocks, and said: "I bring all my cut fingers to you, Alec!"
Something, he knew not exactly what, appealed to him so strongly in that word and look, that resolve came upon him sudden as lightning, and binding as an oath—the man's instinct to be all and to do all for the woman he loves.
He was unusually silent during the rest of the day, so that Mary McArthur, walking beside him down the loaning to bring home the cows, said: "You are no vexed wi' me for onything, Alec?"