We have often tried to recover Ralph’s reply, but the text is corrupt at this place, the context entirely lost.  Experts suspect a palimpsest.

Perhaps we linger overly long on the records; but there is so much called love in the world, which is no love, that there may be some use in dwelling upon the histories of a love which was fresh and tender, sweet and true.  It is at once instruction for the young, and for the older folk a cast back into the days that were.  If to any it is a mockery or a scorning, so much the worse—­for of them who sit in the scorner’s chair the doom is written.

Winsome and Ralph walked on into the eye of the day, hand in hand, as was their wont.  They crossed the dreary moor, which yet is not dreary when you came to look at it on such a morning as this.

The careless traveller glancing at it as he passed might call it dreary; but in the hollows, miniature lakes glistened, into which the tiny spurs of granite ran out flush with the water like miniature piers.  The wind of the morning waking, rippled on the lakelets, and blew the bracken softly northward.  The heather was dark rose purple, the “ling” dominating the miles of moor; for the lavender-grey flush of the true heather had not yet broken over the great spaces of the south uplands.

So their feet dragged slower as they drew near to that spot where they knew they must part.  There was no thought of going back.  There was even little of pain.

Perfect love had done its work.  All frayed and secondhand loves may be made ashamed by the fearlessness of these two walking to their farewell trysting-place, lonely amid the world of heather.  Only daft Jock Gordon above them, like a jealous scout, scoured the heights—­sometimes on all-fours, sometimes bending double, with his long arms swinging like windmills, scaring even the sheep and the deer lest they should come too near.  Overhead there was nothing nearer them than the blue lift, and even that had withdrawn itself infinitely far away, as though the angels themselves did not wish to spy on a later Eden.  It was that midsummer glory of love-time, when grey Galloway covers up its flecked granite and becomes a true Purple Land.

If there be a fairer spot within the four seas than this fringe of birch-fringed promontory which juts into westernmost Loch Ken, I do not know it.  Almost an island, it is set about with the tiniest beaches of white sand.  From the rocks that look boldly up the loch the heather and the saxifrage reflect themselves in the still water.  To reach it Winsome led Ralph among the scented gall-bushes and bog myrtle, where in the marshy meadows the lonely grass of Parnassus was growing.  Pure white petals, veined green, with spikelets of green set in the angles within, five-lobed broidery of daintiest gold stitching, it shone with so clear a presage of hope that Ralph stooped to pick it that he might give it to Winsome.

She stopped him.