But, with the harvesting, the Strath-folk forgot for a while the very existence of the mountain-lovers.
Smitten with the strange rapt elation of their dream, Alan and Sorcha still went to and fro as though spellbound. Sometimes he herded the cows alone: as before, Sorcha milked the sweet-breath kine, singing low her songs of holy St. Bridget or old-world cadences rare and nigh-forgotten now as the Fonnsheen, the fairy melodies once wont to be heard on the hills and in remote places. But, though apart for a brief while, it was only to dream the more.
Yet, strange to say, Alan knew in his heart that this could not endure. It could not be for over long: God, soon or late, lays winter upon the heart, as well as upon the song of the bird, the bloom of the flower.
Nevertheless, he had no trouble because of this. There is, at times, in deep happiness, a gloom as of dark water filled with sunlight. While the glow is there, a living joy, the gloom is no more than the quiet sorrow of the world.
Often, of late, he had noticed upon the hillside, upon brier and bramble, fern-covert or dwarf-elder, that indescribable shadow of light, visible too at full noon in that golden weather as well as at the passing of the sun: that glow of omen, known of Celtic poets and seers in far-gone days. The first line of a fragmentary rune, come down from one of these singers, who walked nearer to nature than does any now among the sons of men, was upon his lips over and over, because of this thing:
"Tha bruaillean air aghaidh nan tom."
"There is boding gloom on the face of the bushes."
Once only the gloom lay upon him, the gloom that is upon the mind as a dark cloud upon a field of grain. What if ill should have come to Sorcha?
He turned, and went swiftly home. The gloaming had fallen, and Sorcha was sitting before the flaming peats, with clasped hands and dreaming eyes. She was crooning, half breathing, half crooning, a song, low and sweet against his ear as the noise of a running brook heard in sleep as one fares by green pastures under a moon strange and new in a strange land. And the song was one he had not known, not since he was a child, and heard Morag, the wife of Kenneth, foster-brother of Fergus Gilchrist, sing it before, in a day of mourning, she brought forth her firstborn:
"An' O, an' O, St. Bride's sweet song 'tis I am hearing, dearie,