He fairly staggered with surprise.  There she was, exactly as he had left her, dusty, barefooted and bareheaded.  The wind had tossed up her hair, which indeed was only too obedient to its will, and it clustered all the more wildly about her face because of having been cropped to the regulation length of the refuge.

“Lassie, is’t you?” he ejaculated, lost in astonishment.  Then, realizing the fact, he gave expression to his feeling by grinning in a convulsive kind of way and clapping her once or twice on the shoulder next him.  “Od!  I niver!  Didna the leddy—­”

Baubie cut him short.  “Sed I widna bide,” she observed curtly and significantly.

Gestures and looks convey, among people like the Wisharts, far more meaning than words, and Baubie’s father perfectly understood from the manner and tone of her pregnant remark that she had run away from school, and had severed the connection between herself and the “kind leddy,” and that in consequence the situation was highly risky for both.  They remained standing still for a moment, looking at each other.  The boy and the woman were already out of sight, and the white, dusty high-road seemed all their own domain.

Wishart shuffled with his feet once more, and looked in the direction of Princes street, and then at Baubie inquiringly.  It was for her, as usual, to decide.  Baubie had been his Providence for as long as he had memory for—­no great length of time.  He was conjecturing in his own mind vaguely whether his Providence had, by any chance, got the desiderated three shillings necessary for the redemption of the banjo hidden away in the Rob Roy tartan.  He would not have been surprised had it been so, and he would have asked no questions.

Seeing that her eyes followed the direction of his with a forbidding frown, he said tentatively, “Ye didn’—­didna—­”

“What?” snapped Baubie crossly:  she divined his meaning exactly.  “Come awa’ wi’ ye!” she ordered, facing right round countryward.

“We’ll gae awa’ til Glasgae, Baubie, eh?  I’m thinkin’ to yer auntie’s. She”—­with a gesture of his head backward at the prison—­“will no’ be oot this month; sae she’ll niver need to ken, eh?”

Baubie nodded.  He only spoke her own thoughts, and he knew it.

The first turn to the right past the High School brought them out on the road before Holyrood, which lay grim and black under the sun-bathed steeps of Arthur’s Seat.  On by the Grange and all round the south-eastern portion of the city this odd couple took their way.  It was a long round, but safety made it necessary.  At last, between Corstorphine’s wooded slopes and the steeper rise of the Pentlands, they struck into the Glasgow road.  In the same order as before they pursued their journey, Baubie leading as of old, now and again vouchsafing a word over her shoulder to her obedient follower, until the dim haze of the horizon received into itself the two quaint figures, and Baubie Wishart and the Rob Roy tartan faded together out of sight.