“Do you not think it’s rather fine?” asked Ellen, in so small and flat a voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up to hadn’t come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands.  It seemed a little surprising to him that she didn’t know what was in his mind without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was glorious.  The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at his ease.  She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her velvet tam-o’-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler that nearly touched her rather pink little nose.  Her jacket was too big for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort of “father’s waistcoat” look.  Yet at a change of the wind, at the slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music heard at dusk in a garden of red roses.  He supposed that to every man of his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises.  He looked at the range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would tell her that he loved her.  It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine what manner of place it would be—­whether there would be grass or heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.

“Well, it’s no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes,” said Ellen.  “We’d best step forward.  I’m glad you like the place.  I love it.  And this bit of the road’s bonny.  When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the ploughman’s cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four.  And if you’ll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians.  The poor things ran like the wind when they saw us.  I wish we could have explained we meant no harm, for I suppose it’s the one time in the day when they count on having the world to themselves.”

“I’ve felt like that about a jaguar,” he said.  “Came on it suddenly, on a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina.  It had been tidying up a monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy.  Lord, the sick fright in its eyes when it saw me.  I’d have given anything to be able to stand it a drink and offer to see it home.”

“Och!” she murmured abashed.  “Me talking about rabbits, and you accustomed to jaguars.  I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit except to look down your nose at it.  But we can’t rise to jaguars in Scotland.  But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt.”