In a few words she told him the marvellous news: Torcall and Anabal at peace; her father now at Ardoch-beag!
At first he too could scarce believe it. Then, little by little, the smaller wonder waned, and the wonder of his love—the wonder of Sorcha grew.
Hand in hand they wandered slowly up the mountain as in a dream. A strange new joy had come to them. The world fell further away, far beneath them. Even the Strath became a shadowy place—a foreign strand where their voyaging boats need never coast.
When the moon rose, first through a tremulous flood of amber-yellow light, thence to emerge as a pale-gold flower, low in the Lios-nan-speur, the "garden of the starry heavens," the mountain lovers were already far up Ben Iolair, and nigh the great Sgòrr-Glan, the precipice that on the eastern flank falls sheer from the Druim-nan-Damh, the Ridge of the Stags, for close upon two thousand feet. Here in a sheltered place known as the Bad-a-sgailich ann choire-na-gaoithe, "the shading clump of trees in the windy corrie," was the sheiling of Murdo the shepherd, which for weeks past had been used by Alan rather than his own hill-sheiling high on Tornideon, where the east wind blew with a fierce breath, and the hill-slope was barren, and there was no Sorcha.
They could hear the wind among the heights, but the moon-wave was everywhere with quiet light, and there was peace.
For a while they stood at the door of the cot. The moonshine touched them with a beam of pale gold—a finger out of heaven. Silent and still it was: no sound but the furtive crying of the wind among the invisible corries and peaks, with a flute-like call among the serrated pinnacles of the Ridge of the Stags. At intervals, as a vagrant breath, came the sigh of the hill-torrents as they fell toward the Srùantsrhà, the wild stream that foams from the lochan of Mairg beyond the Pass of the Eagles, and surges hoarse and dark, even in the summer droughts, at the base of the great precipice of Sgòrr-Glan.
Hand in hand they stood, silence between them. Their eyes dreamed into the moonlit dusk. In the mind of Alan Sorcha moved as a vision; in the mind of Sorcha there were two shadowy figures of dream—Alan, and the child over whose faint breath of life in her womb her heart yearned as a brooding dove.
When Oona awoke she saw that it was dark. In the peat-glow she could descry the figure of Nial crouching in the shadow of the ingle, his gaze fixed upon her.
"What is it, Nial? what have you been doing?"