Angus stood still and watched me.  They both stood still and watched me, and even in my excitement I saw that each of them looked a little pale.

“You said you did not hear him at first, but you surely saw him when he passed so near,” I protested.  “I called to him, and he took off his bonnet, though he did not stop.  He was going so quickly that perhaps he did not hear me call his name.”

What strange thing in Hector’s look checked me?  Who knows?

“You did see him, didn’t you?” I asked of him.

Then he and Angus exchanged glances, as if asking each other to decide some grave thing.  It was Hector MacNairn who decided it.

“No,” he answered, very quietly, “I neither saw nor heard him, even when he passed.  But you did.”

“I did, quite plainly,” I went on, more and more bewildered by the way in which they kept a sort of tender, awed gaze fixed on me.  “You remember I even noticed that he looked pale.  I laughed, you know, when I said he looked almost like one of the White People—­”

Just then my breath caught itself and I stopped.  I began to remember things—­hundreds of things.

Angus spoke to me again as quietly as Hector had spoken.

“Neither Jean nor I ever saw Wee Brown Elspeth,” he said—­“neither Jean nor I. But you did.  You have always seen what the rest of us did not see, my bairn—­always.”

I stammered out a few words, half in a whisper.  “I have always seen what you others could not see?  What—­have—­I—­seen?”

But I was not frightened.  I suppose I could never tell any one what strange, wide, bright places seemed suddenly to open and shine before me.  Not places to shrink back from—­oh no! no!  One could be sure, then—­sure!  Feargus had lifted his bonnet with that extraordinary triumph in his look—­even Feargus, who had been rather dour.

“You called them the White People,” Hector MacNairn said.

Angus and Jean had known all my life.  A very old shepherd who had looked in my face when I was a baby had said I had the eyes which “Saw.”  It was only the saying of an old Highlander, and might not have been remembered.  Later the two began to believe I had a sight they had not.  The night before Wee Brown Elspeth had been brought to me Angus had read for the first time the story of Dark Malcolm, and as they sat near me on the moor they had been talking about it.  That was why he forgot himself when I came to ask them where the child had gone, and told him of the big, dark man with the scar on his forehead.  After that they were sure.

They had always hidden their knowledge from me because they were afraid it might frighten me to be told.  I had not been a strong child.  They kept the secret from my relatives because they knew they would dislike to hear it and would not believe, and also would dislike me as a queer, abnormal creature.  Angus had fears of what they might do with doctors and severe efforts to obliterate from my mind my “nonsense,” as they would have been sure to call it.  The two wise souls had shielded me on every side.