“I dare say that is a good simile,” he reflected.  “Are they different when you know them well?”

“I have never known one but Wee Brown Elspeth,” I answered, thinking it over.

He did start then, in the strangest way.

“What!” he exclaimed.  “What did you say?”

I was quite startled myself.  Suddenly he looked pale, and his breath caught itself.

“I said Wee Elspeth, Wee Brown Elspeth.  She was only a child who played with me,” I stammered, “when I was little.”

He pulled himself together almost instantly, though the color did not come back to his face at once and his voice was not steady for a few seconds.  But he laughed outright at himself.

“I beg your pardon,” he apologized.  “I have been ill and am rather nervous.  I thought you said something you could not possibly have said.  I almost frightened you.  And you were only speaking of a little playmate.  Please go on.”

“I was only going to say that she was fair like that, fairer than any one I had ever seen; but when we played together she seemed like any other child.  She was the first I ever knew.”

I told him about the misty day on the moor, and about the pale troopers and the big, lean leader who carried Elspeth before him on his saddle.  I had never talked to any one about it before, not even to Jean Braidfute.  But he seemed to be so interested, as if the little story quite fascinated him.  It was only an episode, but it brought in the weirdness of the moor and my childish fancies about the things hiding in the white mist, and the castle frowning on its rock, and my baby face pressed against the nursery window in the tower, and Angus and the library, and Jean and her goodness and wise ways.  It was dreadful to talk so much about oneself.  But he listened so.  His eyes never left my face—­they watched and held me as if he were enthralled.  Sometimes he asked a question.

“I wonder who they were—­the horsemen?” he pondered.  “Did you ever ask Wee Elspeth?”

“We were both too little to care.  We only played,” I answered him.  “And they came and went so quickly that they were only a sort of dream.”

“They seem to have been a strange lot.  Wasn’t Angus curious about them?” he suggested.

“Angus never was curious about anything,” I said.  “Perhaps he knew something about them and would not tell me.  When I was a little thing I always knew he and Jean had secrets I was too young to hear.  They hid sad and ugly things from me, or things that might frighten a child.  They were very good.”

“Yes, they were good,” he said, thoughtfully.

I think any one would have been pleased to find herself talking quietly to a great genius—­as quietly as if he were quite an ordinary person; but to me the experience was wonderful.  I had thought about him so much and with such adoring reverence.  And he looked at me as if he truly liked me, even as if I were something new—­a sort of discovery which interested him.  I dare say that he had never before seen a girl who had lived so much alone and in such a remote and wild place.