“With a Samson, eh?” cried Philip, striding on in his riding breeches, and lifting the captured creature in his arms. “Why, to carry her, you torment, to carry her through the gorse like this.”
“Ah!” she said, turning her face over his shoulder, and tickling his neck with her breath.
Her hair caught in a tree, and fell in a dark shower over his breast. He set her on her feet; they took hands, and went carolling down the glen together:
“The brightest jewel in my crown, Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.”
The daylight lingered as if loth to leave them. There was the fluttering of wings overhead, and sometimes the last piping of birds. The wind wandered away, and left their voices sovereign of all the air.
Then there came a distant shout; the cheer of the farm people on reaching home with the Melliah.. It awakened Philip as from a fit of intoxication.
“This is madness,” he thought. “What am I doing?” “He is going to speak now,” she told herself.
Her gaiety shaded off into melancholy, and her melancholy burst into wild gaiety again. The night had come down, the moon had risen, the stars had appeared. She crept closer to Philip's side, and began to tell him the story of a witch. They were near to the house the witch had lived in. There it was—that roofless cottage—that tholthan under the deep trees like a dungeon.
“Have you never heard of her, Philip? No? The one they called the Deemster's lady?”
“What Deemster?” said Philip.