the mistress of the house, and he had the feeling of loyalty to his master’s interests which distinguished the Galloway ploughman of an older time.  He was mortally afraid of bogles, and would not have crossed the kirkyard after the glimmer of midnight without seeing a dozen corpse-candles; but tramps were quite another matter, for Ebie was not in the least afraid of mortal man—­except only of Allan Welsh, the Marrow minister.

So he stole on tiptoe to the byre door, circumnavigating the “wicket,” which poured across the yard its tell-tale plank of light.  Standing within the doorway and looking over the high wooden stall, tenanted in winter by Jock, the shaggy black bull, Ebie saw Jess Kissock, lost in her dreams.  The lantern was set on the floor in front of her.  The candle had nearly burned down to the socket.  Jess’s eyes were large and brilliant.  It seemed to Ebie Farrish that they were shining with light.  Her red lips were pouted, and there was a warm, unwonted flush on her cheeks.  In her dreams she was already mistress of a house, and considering how she would treat her servants.  She would treat them kindly and well.  She had heard her sister, who was servant at Earlston, tell how the ladies there treated their servants.  Jess meant to do just the same.  She meant to be a real lady.  Ambition in a woman has a double chance, for adaptation is inborn along with it.  Most men do not succeed very remarkably in anything, because at heart they do not believe in themselves.  Jess did.  It was her heritage from some Pict, who held back under the covert of his native woods so long as the Roman tortoise crept along, shelved in iron, but who drave headlong into a gap with all his men, when, some accident of formation showed the one chance given in a long day’s march.

Ebie thought he had never seen Jess so beautiful.  It had never struck him before that Jess was really handsomer than Meg.  He only knew that there was a stinging wild-fruit fragrance about Jess and her rare favours he had never experienced in the company of any other woman.  And he had a large experience.

Was it possible that she knew that he was out and was waiting for him?  In this thought, which slowly entered in upon his astonishment, the natural Ebie forced himself to the front.

“Jess!” he exclaimed impulsively, taking a step within, the door.  Instantly, as though some night-flying bat had flown against it, the candle went out—­a breath wafted by him as lightly and as silently as a snowy owl flies home in the twilight.  A subtle something, the influence of a presence, remained, which mingled strangely with the odours of the clover in the neuk, and the sour night-smell of the byre.  Again there was a perfect silence.  Without, a corncrake ground monotonously.  A rat scurried along the rafter.  Ebie in the silence and the darkness had almost persuaded himself that he had been dreaming, when his foot clattered against something which fell over on the cobble-stones that paved the byre.  He stopped and picked it up.  It was the byre lantern.  The wick was still glowing crimson when he opened the little tin door.  As he looked it drew slowly upward into a red star, and winked itself out.  It was no dream.  Jess had been in the byre.  To meet whom? he asked himself.