Twelve o’clock struck, and she rose to go to bed, alarmed lest she should not waken early in the morning.  “But I am afraid I shan’t sleep,” she said, “if that lightning continues.”

“It is harmless,” Gavin answered, going to the window.  He started back next moment, and crying, “Don’t look out, mother,” hastily pulled down the blind.

“Why, Gavin,” Margaret said in fear, “you look as if it had struck you.”

“Oh, no,” Gavin answered, with a forced laugh, and he lit her lamp for her.

But it had struck him, though it was not lightning.  It was the flashing of a lantern against the window to attract his attention, and the holder of the lantern was Babbie.

“Good-night, mother.”

“Good-night, Gavin.  Don’t sit up any later.”

CHAPTER XXII.

Lovers.

Only something terrible, Gavin thought, could have brought Babbie to him at such an hour; yet when he left his mother’s room it was to stand motionless on the stair, waiting for a silence in the manse that would not come.  A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises.  Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.

Now Margaret slept.  Two hours earlier, Jean, sitting on the salt-bucket, had read the chapter with which she always sent herself to bed.  In honour of the little minister she had begun her Bible afresh when he came to Thrums, and was progressing through it, a chapter at night, sighing, perhaps, on washing days at a long chapter, such as Exodus twelfth, but never making two of it.  The kitchen wag-at-the-wall clock was telling every room in the house that she had neglected to shut her door.  As Gavin felt his way down the dark stair, awakening it into protest at every step, he had a glimpse of the pendulum’s shadow running back and forward on the hearth; he started back from another shadow on the lobby wall, and then seeing it start too, knew it for his own.  He opened the door and passed out unobserved; it was as if the sounds and shadows that filled the manse were too occupied with their game to mind an interloper.

“Is that you?” he said to a bush, for the garden was in semi-darkness.  Then the lantern’s flash met him, and he saw the Egyptian in the summer-seat.

“At last!” she said, reproachfully.  “Evidently a lantern is a poor door-bell.”

“What is it?” Gavin asked, in suppressed excitement, for the least he expected to hear was that she was again being pursued for her share in the riot.  The tremor in his voice surprised her into silence, and he thought she faltered because what she had to tell him was so woeful.  So, in the darkness of the summer-seat, he kissed her, and she might have known that with that kiss the little minister was hers forever.