“Surely,” answered he, readily; “and I hope I may be able to answer some of them.”
“I want to tell Robert,” she explained, with a smile. “After we had been to your little kirk on Sunday we both wanted very much to know you. He is to take holy orders, and he and I think a great deal about the work to which he will be called. Your life, now, must be something utterly different from anything we have ever seen or imagined before.”
“Is it?” he said. “Only because such primitive conditions exist perhaps no longer in England. I suppose a time is drawing nearer that will sweep away what lingers here.”
“Well, but—” Lily hesitated an instant. “May I be quite frank?” she put in, deprecatingly. “How is it that you are in such a place?”
He did not know the drift of this question, and looked puzzled.
“Why should I not be?” he asked, diffidently.
The girl glanced expressively to north and south, down and up the lonely valley.
“One might say, speaking roughly,” she said, “that there are no people here,”
Macpherson too looked up the valley, and saw, far off, the hut where that poor shepherd had died, and thoughts of that Sunday morning brought the light into his face.
“That would be ’speaking roughly,’” he said, with a gentleness that made her feel ashamed at first, and then anxious to justify herself.