Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if he had proved a disputed point.  He persuaded himself that the exquisite exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.  She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the early morning at the fringe of the wood.  There was no movement of her beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of her soul.  But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have been so.  She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet.  Oh, he was doing the sensible thing.  There was no day in his life which he was more certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of the two lochs to which this glen led.  By the first, a dull enough stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made him love by repeating it, “Loganlee, Loganlee.”  She made him go on ahead for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the loch.

“There, I knew you’d stop!  There’s no stranger ever gets across this bridge without stopping and looking over.  They call it the Lazy Brig.  The old folk say it’s because there’s a fairy sitting by the burn, a gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies.”  But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him, though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place.  Here black wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art; one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human, grief.  There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked like a bunch of draggled crow’s feathers set in the water, and from this there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that it provoked the imagination and made the mind’s eye see a string of hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing that way at midnight.  It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its graveyard.