Kelpie hesitated a moment longer, then she reverted to old habits and saved herself. She slipped like a hunted wildcat through the crowd, which now had other things on its mind than stopping her. She was out of it, around a corner, through the narrow streets in a swift streak of gray. The clamor grew muffled and scattered. She tore across the stone bridge and the moor and along a glen and over a hill. She ran until she could no longer breathe, and then crawled into a thick patch of broom and lay gasping and sobbing.
She must not think! She could not bear to think. Alex had really done it, then! The thing inside her had never really believed he would, and that was the thing now keening in black anguish that he could have done it.
And Ian! Was he dead, then? Dead trying to save herself, who had then fled without a backward look?
But it was only sense to have saved herself! It was what Ian had been trying to do, to save her, and wouldn’t he have wished it? Why should it be the weight of a stone on her? Ian would have wished it, she told herself. And then she rolled over on her face and was violently sick.
How long had she been walking? And to where? It was just away from the town she had been going, and she was now far away, for she had spent more than one night in the heather. And yet she could not get away from the beating blackness in her mind.
Kelpie sank down in the drenched heather and discovered with vague surprise that rain was pouring steadily from a dreary sky. She looked wearily around and saw nothing but hills and heath closed in mist. She was wet as a water horse, and when had she last eaten?
What was she to do now? And where was she going? She didn’t care much. It would be nice just to lie down and not be waking at all at all. But some inner vitality would never let her do that. She sighed. She must be finding food, then, and learning where she was. For all she knew, she might be back in Campbell country—and that thought roused her just a little.
She dragged herself to her feet and tramped on again. The glen ended in a long loch, so large that both ends were out of sight around the curves of the hills. Kelpie sat down again and thought, slowly, because she could not seem to think very well. There were not so many lochs of this size. She did not think she could have got so far as Loch Rannoch, and this seemed too long for Loch Earn and not wide enough for Loch Lomond. It must be that it was Loch Tay, and if this were so, then she might well be in Campbell country.
If only the sun would come out! If only there were some place that she could go and rest and hide away from the world and her thoughts....
And then she remembered the braes of Balquidder and two kind and lonely old folk who had said, “Haste ye back.”