“Am I strange!” I said, softly.

“Yes, thank God!” he answered.

I had known that some day when we were at Muircarrie together he would tell me what his mother had told me—­about what we three might have been to one another.  I trembled with happiness at the thought of hearing him say it himself.  I knew he was going to say it now.

He held my hand and stroked it.  “My mother told you, Ysobel—­what I am waiting for?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do you know I love you?” he said, very low.

“Yes.  I love you, too.  My whole life would have been heaven if we could always have been together,” was my answer.

He drew me up into his arms so that my cheek lay against his breast as I went on, holding fast to the rough tweed of his jacket and whispering:  “I should have belonged to you two, heart and body and soul.  I should never have been lonely again.  I should have known nothing, whatsoever happened, but tender joy.”

“Whatsoever happened?” he murmured.

“Whatsoever happens now, Ysobel, know nothing but tender joy.  I think you can.  ‘Out on the Hillside!’ Let us remember.”

“Yes, yes,” I said; “‘Out on the Hillside.’” And our two faces, damp with the sweet mist, were pressed together.

CHAPTER X

The mist had floated away, and the moor was drenched with golden sunshine when we went back to the castle.  As we entered the hall I heard the sound of a dog howling, and spoke of it to one of the men-servants who had opened the door.

“That sounds like Gelert.  Is he shut up somewhere?”

Gelert was a beautiful sheep-dog who belonged to Feargus and was his heart’s friend.  I allowed him to be kept in the courtyard.

The man hesitated before he answered me, with a curiously grave face.

“It is Gelert, miss.  He is howling for his master.  We were obliged to shut him in the stables.”

“But Feargus ought to have reached here by this time,” I was beginning.

I was stopped because I found Angus Macayre almost at my elbow.  He had that moment come out of the library.  He put his hand on my arm.

“Will ye come with me?” he said, and led me back to the room he had just left.  He kept his hand on my arm when we all stood together inside, Hector and I looking at him in wondering question.  He was going to tell me something—­we both saw that.

“It is a sad thing you have to hear,” he said.  “He was a fine man, Feargus, and a most faithful servant.  He went to see his mother last night and came back late across the moor.  There was a heavy mist, and he must have lost his way.  A shepherd found his body in a tarn at daybreak.  They took him back to his father’s home.”

I looked at Hector MacNairn and again at Angus.  “But it couldn’t be Feargus,” I cried.  “I saw him an hour ago.  He passed us playing on his pipes.  He was playing a new tune I had never heard before a wonderful, joyous thing.  I both heard and saw him!”