In the silence that followed, the rain dribbled from the sodden bracken and dripping loneroid. Big tears rolled slowly down the deep lines on the face of Sheen. Once there was a sob in her throat, but she put her shaking hand to it, and it was still.
Neil Ross shifted from foot to foot. The ooze in that marshy place squelched with each restless movement he made. Beyond them a plover wheeled, a blurred splatch in the mist, crying its mournful cry over and over and over.
It was a pitiful thing to hear: ah, bitter loneliness, bitter patience of poor old women. That he knew well. But he was too weary, and his heart was nigh full of its own burthen. The words could not come to his lips. But at last he spoke.
“Tha mo chridhe goirt,” he said, with tears in his voice, as he put his hand on her bent shoulder; “my heart is sore.”
She put up her old face against his.
“’S tha e ruidhinn mo chridhe,” she whispered; “it is touching my heart you are.”
After that they walked on slowly through the dripping mist, each dumb and brooding deep.
“Where will you be staying this night?” asked Sheen suddenly, when they had traversed a wide boggy stretch of land; adding, as by an afterthought—“Ah, it is asking you were if the tarn there were Feur-Lochan. No; it is Loch-a-chaoruinn, and the clachan that is near is Contullich.”
“Which way?”