“Oh aye!  It’s bonny.  Will ye be gaeing, since ye have na mair to say?”

English Strickland laughed and said good-by to Mother Binning and went.  The ash-tree, the hazels that fringed the water, a point of mossy rock, hid the cot.  The drone of the wheel no longer reached his ears.  It was as though all that had sunk into the earth.  Here was only the deep, the green, and lonely glen.  He found a pool that invited, cast, and awaited the speckled victim.  In the morning he had had fair luck, but now nothing....  The water showed no more diamonds, the lower slopes of the converging hills grew a deep and slumbrous green.  Above was the gold, shoulder and crest powdered with it, unearthly, uplifted.  Strickland ceased his fishing.  The light moved slowly upward; the trees, the crag-heads, melted into heaven; while the lower glen lay in lengths of shadow, in jade and amethyst.  A whispering breeze sprang up, cool as the water sliding by.  Strickland put up his fisherman’s gear and moved homeward, down the stream.

He had a very considerable way to go.  The glen path, narrow and rough, went up and down, still following the water.  Hazel and birch, oak and pine, overhung and darkened it.  Bosses of rock thrust themselves forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath.  Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents.  In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape.  In the shadow it looked a gnome world—­a gnome or a dragon world.  Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled suns of June flowers, rose and golden, white and azure, while overhead was heard the evening song of birds alike calm and merry, and through a cleft in the hills poured the ruddy, comfortable sun.

The walls declined in height, sloped farther back.  The path grew broader; the water no longer fell roaring, but ran sedately between pebbled beaches.  The scene grew wider, the mouth of the glen was reached.  He came out into a sunset world of dale and moor and mountain-heads afar.  There were fields of grain, and blue waving feathers from chimneys of cottage and farm-house.  In the distance showed a village, one street climbing a hill, and atop a church with a spire piercing the clear east.  The stream widened, flowing thin over a pebbly bed.  The sun was not yet down.  It painted a glory in the west and set lanes and streets of gold over the hills and made the little river like Pactolus.  Strickland approached a farm-house, prosperous and venerable, mended and neat.  Thatched, long, white, and low, behind it barns and outbuildings, it stood tree-guarded, amid fields of young corn.  Beyond it swelled a long moorside; in front slipped the still stream.

There were stepping-stones across the stream.  Two young girls, coming toward the house, had set foot upon these.  Strickland, halting in the shadow of hazels and young aspens, watched them as they crossed.  Their step was free and light; they came with a kind of hardy grace, elastic, poised, and very young, homeward from some visit on this holiday.  The tutor knew them to be Elspeth and Gilian Barrow, granddaughters of Jarvis Barrow of White Farm.  The elder might have been fifteen, the younger thirteen years.  They wore their holiday dresses.  Elspeth had a green silken snood, and Gilian a blue.  Elspeth sang as she stepped from stone to stone: