words of Dandie - heard, not heeded, and still remembered - had lent to
her thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea
of Fate - a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure,
lawless, and august - moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian
men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare
and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, may
be decomposed into a sequence of accidents happily concurring.

She put on a grey frock and a pink kerchief, looked at herself a moment
with approval in the small square of glass that served her for a toilet
mirror, and went softly downstairs through the sleeping house that
resounded with the sound of afternoon snoring. Just outside the door,
Dandie was sitting with a book in his hand, not reading, only honouring
the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind. She came near him and stood
still.

"I'm for off up the muirs, Dandie," she said.

There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him look up.
She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace remained of the levity
of the morning.

"Ay, lass? Ye'll have yer ups and downs like me, I'm thinkin'," he
observed.

"What for do ye say that?" she asked.

"O, for naething," says Dand. "Only I think ye're mair like me than the
lave of them. Ye've mair of the poetic temper, tho' Guid kens little
enough of the poetic taalent. It's an ill gift at the best. Look at