to her brother, and then she and Jean hurried on towards the fatal pasture lands.  Before they crossed the stepping-stones which led to the knolls, Grace could see a little group bending over a spot in the heather; but no sound reached them through the calm evening air, except the rippling of the sunset-tinted river, which rolled between.  And so Geordie was lying there gored, maimed, perhaps dying, as Jean persisted in saying.  Grace felt her heart sink with fear, lest the sorrowful refrain should be true, as she crept silently near to the place where the little company was gathered.  But Geordie was not dead.

“Here comes Miss Campbell,” somebody said, and then the circle opened up, and Grace caught a glimpse of her scholar lying very quietly among the heather with his blue eye turned gladly to welcome his friend.

“It was only a faint, after all,—­and some bruises that will soon heal,” Mistress Gowrie said, in a tone of relieved anxiety, as she rose from the turf where she had been kneeling to make way for Grace, who felt an intense relief as she bent smilingly over him, and talked gently of the danger past, with her heart full of thankfulness.

When little Jean saw the happy aspect of matters, her grief gave place to the wildest ecstasy of delight.  Throwing herself down beside her brother, she shouted gleefully, “Oh, Geordie, Geordie, ye’re no dyin’ after all, ye’re all right.  I’ll never greet again all the days o’ my life,” was the rash promise which she made in her joy, remembering Geordie’s dislike to tears.  Presently her thoughts reverted to her treasure, which, in her grief, had been forgotten.  It had been dropped on the knoll when the accident happened, and Jean now bounded off gleefully in search of it.

A doctor had been sent for soon after the accident, but Geordie seemed so well that old Gowrie already began to regret that they had been in such haste in sending to fetch him.  Presently Mistress Gowrie left the knolls and returned to her usual evening duties, which she felt were put sadly in arrear owing to this outbreak of Blackie’s, and feeling truly thankful that it had ended so fortunately.  She invited old Granny Baxter to have a cup of tea with her at the farm, which was a very great mark of graciousness on the part of “the mistress,” and extremely gratifying to the old woman, to whom attentions of the kind came rarely.

It had been arranged, also, by the farmer’s wife that Geordie should be moved into the “best bedroom” before the doctor came, and Granny Baxter was filled with pride when she was shown the woodruff-scented chamber, with its dark shining floor, and among other impressive decorations from the farmyard, a waving canopy of peacock feathers above the ancient chimney-piece, where Geordie was to sleep among snowy sheets that night.  But each time that they proposed he should be carried there from his rough bed among the heather, Geordie pled rather wistfully, “Just wait a wee while.  I’m right comfortable here among the heather,” and once he added with a sad smile as he glanced at the farmer’s wife, “But I’ll no be able to supper the beasts the night, Mistress Gowrie.  Maybe Sandy will look to them.  Puir Blackie! give him a good supper; he didn’t mean any ill.”