the horses when the ploughmen loosed Bell and Jess from the
plough. In these days she rode without a side-saddle. Sometimes
she did it yet when the spring gloamings were gathering fast, but
no one knew this except Jock Forrest, the ploughman, who never
told any more than he could help.

Silence deep as that of yesterday wrapped about the farmhouse of
Craig Ronald. The hens were all down under the lee of the great
orchard hedge, chuckling low to themselves, and nestling with
their feathers spread balloon-wise, while they flirted the hot
summer dust over them. Down where the grass was in shadow a mower
was sharpening his blade. The clear metallic sound of the "strake"
or sharpening strop, covered with pure white Loch Skerrow sand set
in grease, which scythemen universally use in Galloway, cut
through the slumberous hum of the noonday air like the blade
itself through the grass. The bees in the purple flowers beneath
the window boomed a mellow bass, and the grasshoppers made love by
millions in the couch grass, chirring in a thousand fleeting
raptures.

"Wait here while I go in," commanded Winsome, indicating a chair
in the cool, blue-flagged kitchen, which Meg Kissock had marked
out in white, with whorls and crosses of immemorial antiquity--the
same that her Pictish forefathers had cut deep in the hard
Silurian rocks of the southern uplands.

It was a little while before, in the dusk of the doorway Winsome
appeared, looking paler and fairer and more infinitely removed
from him than before. Instinctively he wished himself out with her
again on the broomy knowe. He seemed somehow nearer to her there.