Presently Geordie, by dint of his exertions, managed to arrange the cattle, with the formidable Blackie in front, in quite an orderly procession, and he now prepared to move towards the farm, whose white gables were visible from the pasture.  He never looked back at Grace, or gave any parting sign of recognition of her presence, and she began to fear that perhaps after all he might forget about her invitation and fail to appear on Sunday.

“You won’t forget to come to Kirklands on Sunday afternoon, Geordie?” she called after him, trying to raise her voice above the noisy little stream.

“Didna I say that I would come and bring Jean? and I aye keep my trysts,” he shouted back again, with a look of indignant astonishment that she should have imagined him capable of forgetting or failing to keep his promise; and then he trudged away cheerily, swinging his stick, more full of the idea of this “tryst” than Grace could guess, though his mind dwelt chiefly on the thought of what a grand thing it would be for little Jean to get a chance of learning to read.  He was painfully conscious that he had signally failed in his attempts to teach her, and he was the only teacher she had ever had.

In this little, unkempt, sun-bleached herd-boy there dwelt a very tender, chivalrous heart, and on his little sister Jean all his wealth, of affection had as yet been bestowed.  Never did faithful knight serve his lady-love more devotedly than Geordie had this little brown maiden, since her earliest babyhood.

They were orphans, and ever since they could remember their home had been with their grandmother, a frail, dreamy old woman, so deaf that the most active and varied gesticulation was the only means of conveying to her the remotest idea of what one wished to say.  Geordie, indeed, was the only person sufficiently careless of his lungs to attempt the medium of speech, and then his conversation was pitched in the same key as when he performed his herding functions.

To the little Jean, Geordie had been playmate and protector in one, her absolute slave from the time she sat on her old grandmother’s knee, and, tiring of that position, lisped out, “Deordie, Deordie,” holding out her little brown hands so that he might take her, and then they would sit together on the earthen floor of the cottage, and the gipsy locks would intermingle with Geordie’s flaxen hair, which yielded meekly to as rough treatment from the little brown fingers as ever hapless terrier of the nursery was called on to undergo.  But Geordie’s sun-bleached locks had always been at her service, and his head and hands too; though it was not much that the little herd-boy had been able to do for his sister.  Often as he lay on the heather, watching his cows, he smiled with delight as he thought of the time when he should be promoted into a farm servant, with wages enough to send Jean to school, and to buy her a pretty print dress, all dotted with blue stars, like the one Mistress Gowrie