“Do not pull it,” she said; “leave it for me to come and look at—­ when—­when you are gone.  It will soon wither if it is taken away; but give me some of the bog myrtle instead,” she added, seeing that Ralph looked a little disappointed.

Ralph gathered some of the narrow, brittle, fragrant leaves.  Winsome carefully kept half for herself, and as carefully inserted a spray in each pocket of his coat.

“There, that will keep you in mind of Galloway!” she said.  And indeed the bog myrtle is the characteristic smell of the great world of hill and moss we call by that name.  In far lands the mere thought of it has brought tears to the eyes unaccustomed, so close do the scents and sights of the old Free Province—­the lordship of the Picts—­wind themselves about the hearts of its sons.

“We transplant badly, we plants of the hills.  You must come back to me,” said Winsome, after a pause of wondering silence.

Loch Ken lay like a dream in the clear dispersed light of the morning, the sun shimmering upon it as through translucent ground glass.  Teal and moor-hen squattered away from the shore as Winsome and Ralph climbed the brae, and stood looking northward over the superb levels of the loch.  On the horizon Cairnsmuir showed golden tints through his steadfast blue.

Whaups swirled and wailed about the rugged side of Bennan above their heads.  Across the loch there was a solitary farm so beautifully set that Ralph silently pointed it out to Winsome, who smiled and shook her head.

“The Shirmers has just been let on a nineteen years’ lease,” she said, “eighteen to run.”

So practical was the answer, that Ralph laughed, and the strain of his sadness was broken.  He did not mean to wait eighteen years for her, fathers or no fathers.

Then beyond, the whole land leaped skyward in great heathery sweeps, save only here and there, where about some hill farm the little emerald crofts and blue-green springing oatlands clustered closest.  The loch spread far to the north, sleeping in the sunshine.  Burnished like a mirror it was, with no breath upon it.  In the south the Dee water came down from the hills peaty and brown.  The roaring of its rapids could faintly be heard.  To the east, across the loch, an island slept in the fairway, wooded to the water’s edge.

It were a good place to look one’s last on the earth, this wooded promontory, which might indeed have been that mountain, though a little one, from which was once seen all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.  For there are no finer glories on the earth than red heather and blue loch, except only love and youth.

So here love and youth had come to part, between the heather that glowed on the Bennan Hill and the sapphire pavement of Loch Ken.

For a long time Winsome and Ralph were silent—­the empty interior sadness, mixed of great fear and great hunger, beginning to grip them as they stood.  Lives only just twined and unified were again to twain.  Love lately knit was to be torn asunder.  Eyes were to look no more into the answering eloquence of other eyes.