So saying, McMurdie rode on toward the mill, and Birkendelly, after
musing for some time, turned his beast's head slowly round, and began
to move toward the great muckle village.

The Laird's feelings were now in terrible commotion. He was taken
beyond measure with the beauty and elegance of the figure he had seen,
but he remembered, with a mixture of admiration and horror, that a
dream of the same enchanting object had haunted his slumbers all
the days of his life; yet, how singular that he should never have
recollected the circumstance till now! But farther, with the dream
there were connected some painful circumstances which, though terrible
in their issue, he could not recollect so as to form them into any
degree of arrangement.

As he was considering deeply of these things and riding slowly down
the declivity, neither dancing his cane nor singing the _Laird of
Windy-wa's_, he lifted up his eyes, and there was the girl on the same
spot where he saw her first, walking deliberately up the Birky Brow.
The sun was down, but it was the month of August and a fine evening,
and the Laird, seized with an unconquerable desire to see and speak
with that incomparable creature, could restrain himself no longer, but
shouted out to her to stop till he came up. She beckoned acquiescence,
and slackened her pace into a slow movement. The Laird turned the
corner quickly, but when he had rounded it the maiden was still there,
though on the summit of the brow. She turned round, and, with an
ineffable smile and curtsy, saluted him, and again moved slowly on.
She vanished gradually beyond the summit, and while the green feathers
were still nodding in view, and so nigh that the Laird could have
touched them with a fishing-rod, he reached the top of the brow
himself. There was no living soul there, nor onward, as far as his