Was it the touch of her warm, trembling fingers about his face, or was it the low-breathing, piteous cry of her voice that seemed to stir his pulses and call him slowly back to life? The eyelids opened wearily—to find this wonderful vision hanging over him, and they seemed to rest there and understand.
"Mo-lua!"[#] he murmured.
[#] Mo-luaidh—My dearest one, or my most-prized one.
She did not know the meaning of the phrase; but the look in his eyes was enough. She held his hand as they carried him up to the house.
* * * * *
It was on a clear and white-shining morning in the following spring that Donald Ross and his newly-wedded bride were walking arm-in-arm through the budding larch-woods, the sun warm on the green bracken, on the golden furze, and on the grey rocks. She was angry with him; though the anger did not show much in her dimpled and fresh-tinted cheeks, nor yet in her eyes, where the love-light lay only half-concealed by the modest lashes.
"It is a pestilent language!" she was saying, with frowning brows. "I do believe the heavens and the earth shall pass away before I become thoroughly acquainted with that awful grammar; and unless, as Barbara says, I 'have the Gaelic,' how am I ever to get into proper relationship with the people about here?—yes, and how am I to be sure that you are not stealing away their hearts from me? Oh, it is a very pretty trick, the stealing away of hearts—you are rather clever at it," said she, with downcast and smiling eyes.
"Mo-ghaol," said he (and there were some Gaelic phrases, at least, of which she had by this time got to know the meaning well enough), "I thought you were going to let me be your interpreter."
"Why do you not begin, then? Where are the verses that Mrs. Armour sent?" she said. "You promised you would write out a translation for me."
"And so I have," he answered her—yet with some apparent unwillingness. "I have written out a translation, in a kind of a way, because you insisted on it. But it is a shame. For the Gaelic is a most expressive language; and all the subtlety and grace of the original escape when you come down to a literal rendering in English. Besides, what skill have I in such things? If you like, I will send it to the editor of the Celtic Magazine, and ask him to get it properly translated—he has printed some of Mrs. Armour's pieces before now—in Gaelic, of course——"