hear him murmuring to himself at intervals, “Surely that is the sense—­it must be taken this way.”  Sometimes, on the contrary, he shook his head at Luther’s Commentary, which lay on the short, warm turf before him, as if in reproof.  Ralph was of opinion that Luther, but for his great protective reputation, and the fact that he had been dead some time, might have been served with a libel for heresy—­at least if he had ministered to the Marrow kirk.

Then after a little he pulled his hat over his eyes to think, and lay back till he could just see one little bit of Loch Grannoch gleaming through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the hillside high above it.  He counted the sheep on the green field over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no opinions upon Luther to sober them.

Gradually a haze spun itself over the landscape, and Ralph Peden’s head slowly fell back till it rested somewhat sharply upon a spikelet of prickly whin.  His whole body sat up instantly, with an exclamation which was quite in Luther’s manner.  He had not been sleeping.  He rejected the thought; yet he acknowledged that it was nevertheless passing strange that, just where the old single-arched bridge takes a long stride over the Grannoch lane, there was now a great black pot a-swing above a blinking pale fire of peats and fir-branches, and a couple of great tubs set close together on stones which he had not seen before.  There was, too, a ripple of girls’ laughter, which sent a strange stirring of excitement along the nerves of the young man.  He gathered his books to move away; but on second thoughts, looking through the long, swaying tendrils of the broom under which he sat, he resolved to remain.  After all, the girls might be as harmless as his helper of yesterday.

“Yet it is most annoying,” he said; “I had been quieter in James’s Court.”

Still he smiled a little to himself, for the broom did not grow in James’s Court, nor the blackbirds flute their mellow whistle there.

Loch Grannoch stretched away three miles to the south, basking in alternate blue and white, as cloud and sky mirrored themselves upon it.  The first broad rush of the ling [Footnote:  Common heath (Erica tetralix).] was climbing the slopes of the Crae Hill above —­a pale lavender near the loch-side, deepening to crimson on the dryer slopes where the heath-bells grew shorter and thicker together.  The wimpling lane slid as silently away from the sleeping loch as though it were eloping and feared to awake an angry parent.  The whole range of hill and wood and water was drenched in sunshine.  Silence clothed it like a garment—­save only for the dark of the shadow under the bridge, from whence had come that ring of girlish laughter which had jarred upon the nerves of Ralph Peden.