“You’re fey!” said Alexander, at last.

“Na, na!” spoke Jenny.  “But, oh, he’s the bonny lad!”

The dinner was eaten.  It was time to be going.

“Shut your book of stories!” said Alexander.  “We’re for the Kelpie’s Pool, and that’s not just a step from here!”

Elspeth raised her brown eyes.  “Why will you go to the Kelpie’s Pool?  That’s a drear water!”

“I want to show it to him.  He’s never seen it.”

“It’s drear!” said Elspeth.  “A drear, wanrestfu’ place!”

But Ian and Alexander must go.  The aunt and nieces accompanied them to the door, stood and watched them forth, down the bank and into the path that ran to the glen.  Looking back, the youths saw them there—­Elspeth and Gilian and their aunt Jenny.  Then the aspens came between and hid them and the white house and all.

“They’re bonny lasses!” said Ian.

“Aye.  They’re so.”

“But, oh, man! you should see Miss Delafield of Tower Place in Surrey!”

“Is she so bonny?”

“She’s more than bonny.  She’s beautiful and high-born and an heiress.  When I’m a colonel of dragoons—­”

“Are you going to be a colonel of dragoons?”

“Something like that.  You talk of thinking that you were this and that in the past.  Well, I was a fighting-man!”

“We’re all fighting-men.  It’s only what we fight and how.”

“Well, say that I had been a chief, and they lifted me on their shields and called me king, the very next day I should have made her queen!”

“You think like a ballad.  And, oh, man, you talk mickle of the lasses!”

Ian looked at him with long, narrow, dark-gold eyes.  “They’re found in ballads,” he said.

Alexander just paused in his stride.  “Humph! that’s true!...”

They entered the glen.  The stream began to brawl; on either hand the hills closed in, towering high.  Some of the trees were bare, but to most yet clung the red-brown or the gold-brown dress.  The pines showed hard, green, and dead in the shadow; in the sunlight, fine, green-gold, and alive.  The fallen leaves, moved by foot or by breeze, made a light, dry, talking sound.  The white birch stems clustered and leaned; patches of bright-green moss ran between the drifts of leaves.  The sides of the hills came close together, grew fearfully steep.  Crags appeared, and fern-crowded fissures and roots of trees like knots of frozen serpents.  The glen narrowed and deepened; the water sang with a loud, rough voice.

Alexander loved this place.  He had known it in childhood, often straying this way with the laird, or with Sandy the shepherd, or Davie from the house.  When he was older he began to come alone.  Soon he came often alone, learned every stick and stone and contour, effect of light and streak of gloom.  As idle or as purposeful as the wind, he knew the glen from top to bottom.  He knew the voice of the stream and the straining clutch of the roots over