And meantime Hannah, the beautiful Highland girl, was singing.  The fresh young voice rose high above the rain.  Even the birds seemed to pause to listen, and as they listened to the simple words of the Gaelic folk-song, fell off the bough with a thud on the grass.

The Highland girl made a beautiful picture as she stood.

Her bare feet were in the burn, the rippling water of which laved her ankles.  The lobsters played about her feet, or clung affectionately to her toes, as if loath to leave the water and be gathered in the folds of her blue apron.

It was a scene to charm the heart of a Burne-Jones, or an Alma Tadema, or of anybody fond of lobsters.

The girl’s golden hair flowed widely behind her, gathered in a single braid with a piece of stovepipe wire.

“Will you sell me one of your lobsters?”

Hannah looked up.  There, standing in the burn a few yards above her, was the vision of a young man.

The beautiful Highland girl gazed at him fascinated.

He seemed a higher order of being.

He carried a fishing-rod and basket in his hand.  He was dressed in a salmon-fishing costume of an English gentleman.  Salmon-fishing boots reached to his thighs, while above them he wore a fishing-jacket fastened loosely with a fishing-belt about his waist.  He wore a small fishing-cap on his head.

There were no fish in his basket.

He drew near to the Highland girl.

Hannah knew as she looked at him that it must be Ian McWhinus, the new laird.

At sight she loved him.

“Ye’re sair welcome,” she said, as she handed to the young man the finest of her lobsters.

He put it in his basket.

Then he felt in the pocket of his jacket and brought out a sixpenny-piece.

“You must let me pay for it,” he said.

Hannah took the sixpence and held it a moment, flushing with true Highland pride.

“I’ll no be selling the fush for money,” she said.

Something in the girl’s speech went straight to the young man’s heart.  He handed her half a crown.  Whistling lightly, he strode off up the side of the burn.  Hannah stood gazing after him spell-bound.  She was aroused from her reverie by an angry voice calling her name.

“Hannah, Hannah,” cried the voice, “come away ben; are ye daft, lass, that ye stand there keeking at a McWhinus?”

Then Hannah realised what she had done.

She had spoken with a McWhinus, a thing that no McShamus had done for a hundred and fifty years.  For nearly two centuries the McShamuses and the McWhinuses, albeit both dwellers in the Glen, had been torn asunder by one of those painful divisions by which the life of the Scotch people is broken into fragments.

It had arisen out of a point of spiritual belief.