praying for composure. Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full
of incongruous and futile speeches. What was there to make a work
about? She could take care of herself, she supposed! There was no harm
in seeing the laird. It was the best thing that could happen. She
would mark a proper distance to him once and for all. Gradually the
wheels of her nature ceased to go round so madly, and she sat in passive
expectation, a quiet, solitary figure in the midst of the grey moss. I
have said she was no hypocrite, but here I am at fault. She never
admitted to herself that she had come up the hill to look for Archie.
And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls.
For the steps of love in the young, and especially in girls, are
instinctive and unconscious.

In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was
consciously seeking her neighbourhood. The afternoon had turned to
ashes in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and
drawn him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began
to come on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered
ejaculation, by the moor path to Cauldstaneslap. He had no hope to find
her; he took the off chance without expectation of result and to relieve
his uneasiness. The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the
slope and came into the hollow of the Deil's Hags, to see there, like an
answer to his wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and
the pink kerchief sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely
solitary, in these desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone
of the dead weaver. Those things that still smacked of winter were all
rusty about her, and those things that already relished of the spring
had put forth the tender and lively colours of the season. Even in the
unchanging face of the death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in
the channeled lettering, the moss began to renew itself in jewels of