Micah rubbed his face dry, and said, “Will you let me stand on the Standing Stane and watch you gaen awa for ever and ever?”

At that a sob broke from Babbie’s heart, and looking at her doubtfully Micah said—­

“Maybe you’re gey ill for what you’ve done?”

“Ay,” Babbie answered, “I’m gey ill for what I’ve done.”

A minute passed, and in her anguish she did not know that still she was standing at the dyke.  Micah’s voice roused her: 

“You said you would gang awa, and you’re no gaen,”

Then Babbie went away.  The boy watched her across the hill.  He climbed the Standing Stone and gazed after her until she was but a coloured ribbon among the broom.  When she disappeared into Windyghoul he ran home, joyfully, and told his father what a good day’s work he had done.  Rob struck him for a fool for taking a gypsy’s word, and warned him against speaking of the woman in Thrums.

But though Dow believed that Gavin continued to meet the Egyptian secretly, he was wrong.  A sum of money for Nanny was sent to the minister, but he could guess only from whom it came.  In vain did he search for Babbie.  Some months passed and he gave up the search, persuaded that he should see her no more.  He went about his duties with a drawn face that made many folk uneasy when it was stern, and pained them when it tried to smile.  But to Margaret, though the effort was terrible, he was as he had ever been, and so no thought of a woman crossed her loving breast.

CHAPTER XXV.

Beginning of the twenty-four hours.

I can tell still how the whole of the glen was engaged about the hour of noon on the fourth of August month; a day to be among the last forgotten by any of us, though it began as quietly as a roaring March.  At the Spittal, between which and Thrums this is a halfway house, were gathered two hundred men in kilts, and many gentry from the neighboring glens, to celebrate the earl’s marriage, which was to take place on the morrow, and thither, too, had gone many of my pupils to gather gossip, at which girls of six are trustier hands than boys of twelve.  Those of us, however, who were neither children nor of gentle blood, remained at home, the farmers more taken up with the want of rain, now become a calamity, than with an old man’s wedding, and their women-folk wringing their hands for rain also, yet finding time to marvel at the marriage’s taking place at the Spittal instead of in England, of which the ignorant spoke vaguely as an estate of the bride’s.

For my own part I could talk of the disastrous drought with Waster Lunny as I walked over his parched fields, but I had not such cause as he to brood upon it by day and night; and the ins and outs of the earl’s marriage were for discussing at a tea-table, where there were women to help one to conclusions, rather than for the reflections of a solitary dominie, who had seen neither bride nor bridegroom.  So it must be confessed that when I might have been regarding the sky moodily, or at the Spittal, where a free table that day invited all, I was sitting in the school-house, heeling my left boot, on which I have always been a little hard.