Only she went to the hill-top by the side of Loch Ken and looked northward every eventide; and her heart yearned within her.

CHAPTER XLIV.

Winsome’s last tryst.

It was the morn before a wedding, and there had been a constant stir all night all about the farmsteading, for a brand-new world was in the making.  Such a marrying had not been for years.  The farmers’ sons for miles around were coming on their heavy plough-horses, with here and there one of better breed.  Long ago in the earliest morning some one had rung the bell of the little kirk of the Dullarg.  It came upon the still air a fairy tinkle, and many a cottar and many a shepherd turned over with a comfortable feeling:  “This is the Sabbath morn; I need not rise so soon to-day.”  But all their wives remembered, and turned them out with wifely elbow.

It was Winsome Charteris’s wedding day.  The flower of all the countryside was to wed the young Edinburgh lad who had turned out so great a poet.  It was the opinion of the district that her “intended” had unsettled the thrones of all the great writers of the past by his volume of poems, which no one in the parish had read; but the fame of whose success had been wafted down upon the eastern breezes which bore the snell bite of the metropolis upon their front.

“Tra-la-la-la!” chanted the cocks of Craig Ronald.

“Tra-la-la-la-la!” airily sang the solitary bird which lived up among the pine woods, where, in the cot of Mistress Kissock, Ralph Peden occupied the little bedroom which Meg had got ready for him with such care and honour.

“Tra-la-la-laa!” was echoed in the airiest diminuendo from the far-away leader of the harem at the Nether Orae.  His challenge crossed the wide gulf of air above Loch Grannoch, from which in the earliest morning the mists were rising.

Ralph Peden heard all three birds.  He had a delightfully comfortable bedroom, and the flowers on the little white-covered table have come from the front square of Mistress Kissock’s garden.  There was a passion-flower on his table, which somehow reminded him of a girl who had put poppies in hair of the raven’s wing hue.  It had not grown in the garden of the cot.

Yet Ralph was out in the earliest dawn, listening to the sighing of the trees and taking in the odour of the perfume from the pines on the slope.

Ralph did not write any poem this morning, though the Muses were abroad in the stillness of the dawn.  His eyes were on a little window once more overclambered by the June roses.  His poem was down there, and it was coming to him.