Ralph sprang clear of Jess Kissock in a moment.  He knew the voice.  He would have known it had it come to him across the wreck of worlds.  It was his love’s voice.  She was calling to him—­Ralph Peden—­for help.  Without a thought for the woman whose despairing words he had just listened to, he turned and ran, plunging into the thick darkness of the woods, hillward in the direction of the cry.  But he had not gone far when another cry was heard—­not the cry of a woman this time, but the shorter, shriller, piercing yell of a man at the point of death—­some deadly terror at his throat, choking him.  Mixed with this came also unearthly, wordless, inhuman howlings, as of a wild beast triumphing.  For a dozen seconds these sounds dominated the night.  Then upon the hill they seemed to sink into a moaning, and a long, low cry, like the whining of a beaten dog.  Lights gleamed about the farm, and Ralph could vaguely see, as he sprang out of the ravine, along which he and Winsome had walked, dark forms flitting about with lanterns.  In another moment he was out on the moor, ranging about like a wild, questing hound, seeking the cause of the sudden and hideous outcry.

CHAPTEE XXX.

The hill gate.

There was no merry group outside Winsome’s little lattice window this night, as she sat unclad to glimmering white in the quiet of her room.  In her heart there was that strange, quiet thrill of expectancy—­the resolve of a maiden’s heart, when she knows without willing that at last the flood-gates of her being must surely be raised and the great flood take her to the sea.  She did not face the thought of what she would say.  In such a case a man plans what he will say, and once in three times he says it.  But a woman is wiser.  She knows that in that hour it will be given her what she shall speak.

“I shall go to him,” said Winsome to herself; “I must, for he is going away, and he has need of me.  Can I let him go without a word?”

Though Ralph had done no noble action in her sight or within her ken, yet there was that about him which gave her the knowledge that she would be infinitely safe with him even to the world’s end.  Winsome wondered how she could so gladly go, when she would not have so much as dreamed of stealing out at night to meet any other, though she might have known him all her life.  She did not know, often as she had heard it read, that “perfect love casteth out fear.”  Then she said to herself gently, as if she feared that the peeping roses at the window might hear, “Perhaps it is because I love him.”  Perhaps it was.  Happy Winsome, to have found it out so young!

The curtain of the dark drew down.  Moist airs blew into the room, warm with the scent of the flowers of a summer night.  Honeysuckle and rose blew in, and quieted the trembling nerves of the girl going to meet her first love.

“He has sair need o’ me!” she said, lapsing as she sometimes did into her grandmother’s speech.  “He will stand before me,” she said, “and look so pale and beautiful.  Then I will not let him come nearer—­for a while—­unless it is very dark and I am afraid.”