Suddenly there emerged from the indigo shade where the blue spruces overarched the bridge a girl carrying two shining pails of water.  Her arms were bare, her sleeves being rolled high above her elbow; and her figure, tall and shapely, swayed gracefully to the movement of the pails.  Ralph did not know before that there is an art in carrying water.  He was ignorant of many things, but even with his views on woman’s place in the economy of the universe, he could not but be satisfied with the fitness and the beauty of the girl who came up the path, swinging her pails with the compensatory sway of lissom body, and that strong outward flex of the elbow which kept the brimming cans swinging in safety by her side.

Ralph Peden never took his eyes off her as she came, the theories of James’s Court notwithstanding.  Nor indeed need we for a little.  For this is Winifred, better known as Winsome Charteris, a very important young person indeed, to whose beauty and wit the poets of three parishes did vain reverence; and, what she might well value more, whose butter was the best (and commanded the highest price) of any that went into Dumfries market on Wednesdays.

Fair hair, crisping and tendrilling over her brow, swept back in loose and flossy circlets till caught close behind her head by a tiny ribbon of blue—­then again escaping it went scattering and wavering over her shoulders wonderingly, like nothing on earth but Winsome Charteris’s hair.  It was small wonder that the local poets grew grey before their time in trying to find a rhyme for “sunshine,” a substantive which, for the first time, they had applied to a girl’s hair.  For the rest, a face rather oval than long, a nose which the schoolmaster declared was “statuesque” (used in a good sense, he explained to the village folk, who could never be brought to see the difference between a statue and an idol—­the second commandment being of literal interpretation along the Loch Grannoch side), and eyes which, emulating the parish poet, we can only describe as like two blue waves when they rise just far enough to catch a sparkle of light on their crests.  The subject of her mouth, though tempting, we refuse to touch.  Its description has already wrecked three promising reputations.

But withal Winsome Charteris set her pails as frankly and plumply on the ground, as though she were plain as a pike-staff, and bent a moment over to look into the gypsy-pot swung on its birchen triangle.  Then she made an impatient movement of her hand, as if to push the biting fir-wood smoke aside.  This angered Ralph, who considered it ridiculous and ill-ordered that a gesture which showed only a hasty temper and ill-regulated mind should be undeniably pretty and pleasant to look upon, just because it was made by a girl’s hand.  He was angry with himself, yet he hoped she would do it again.  Instead, she took up one pail of water after the other, swung them upward with a single dexterous movement, and