So he continued to wander much about the lanes with a book.  In the summer he could be met with at all hours of light and dusk.  Howpaslet was a land of honeysuckle and clematis.  The tendrils clung to every hedge, and the young man wandered forth to breathe the gracious airs.  One day in early June he was abroad.  It was a Saturday, his day of days.  Somehow he could not read that morning, though he had a book in his pocket, for the stillness of early summer (when the buds come out in such numbers that the elements are stilled with the wonder of watching) had broken up.  It was a day of rushing wind and sudden onpelts of volleying rain.  The branches creaked, and the young green leaves were shred untimeously from the beeches.  All the orchards were dappled with flying showers of rosy snow, as the blossoms of the apple and cherry fled before the swirling gusts of cheerful tempest.

Duncan Rowallan was up on the windy braeface above the kirk of Howpaslet, with one hand to his cloth cap, as he held down his head and bored himself into the eye of the wind.  Of a sudden he was amazed to see a straw hat, with a flash of scarlet about it, whirl past him, spinning upon its edge.  To turn and pursue was the work of a moment.  But he did not catch the run-away till it brought up, blown flat against the kirkyard dyke.  He returned with it in his hand.  A tall slip of a girl stood on the slope, her hair wind-blown and unfilleted—­wind-blown also as to her skirts.  Duncan knew her.  It was the minister’s daughter, the only child of the house of his enemy.

They met—­he beneath, she above on the whinny braeface.  Her hair, usually so smooth, blew out towards him in love-locks and witch-tangles.  For the first time in his life Duncan saw a faint colour in the cheeks of the minister’s daughter.

The teacher of the village school found himself apologising, he was not quite sure for what.  He held the hat out a little awkwardly.

“I found it,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

This description of his undignified progress as he rattled down the face of the hill after the whirling hat amused Grace Hutchison, and she laughed a little, which helped things wonderfully.

“But you have lost your own cap,” she said, looking at his cropped blond poll without disapproval.

“It does not matter,” said Duncan, rubbing it all over with his hand as though the action would render it waterproof.

Now, Grace Hutchison was accustomed to domineer over her father in household matters, such as the care of his person; so it occurred to her that she ought to order this young man to go and look after his cap.  But she did not.  On the contrary, she took a handkerchief out of her pocket, disentangling it mysteriously from the recesses of flapping skirts.

“Put that over your head till you get your own,” she said.