Ralph would have been glad to have been able to slip off quietly
to the manse. He told himself so over and over again, till he
believed it. This process is easy. But he saw very well that he
could not rise from the lee of the whin bush without being in full
view of this eminently practical and absurdly attractive young
woman. So he turned to his Hebrew Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim
contraction of determined brows which recalled his father. A
country girl was nothing to the hunter after curious roots and the
amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and Pual.

"I WILL not be distracted!" Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot,
correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant
particle through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.

A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.

"Bless me," said Ralph, startled, "this is most discomposing!"

He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of
the water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac
sunbonnet in her hand. She wared it high above her head, then she
paused a moment to look right in his direction under her hand held
level with her brows. Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a
couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had
only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the
parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat
fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the
gorse. A most revolutionary young person this. He regretted that
the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.