“You have never seen her since that night?” Gavin asked me, without hope in his voice.

Had he been less hopeless he would have wondered why I did not reply immediately.  I was looking covertly at the mudhouse, of which we were now within a few yards.  Babbie’s face had gone from the window, and. the door remained shut.  That she could hear every word we uttered now, I could not doubt.  But she was hiding from the man for whom her soul longed.  She was sacrificing herself for him.

“Never,” I answered, notwithstanding my pity of the brave girl, and then while I was shaking lest he should go in to visit Nanny, I heard the echo of the Auld Licht bell.

“That calls me to the meeting for rain,” Gavin said, bidding me good-night.  I had acted for Margaret, and yet I had hardly the effrontery to take his hand.  I suppose he saw sympathy in my face, for suddenly the cry broke from him—­

“If I could only know that nothing evil had befallen her!”

Babbie heard him and could not restrain a heartbreaking sob.

“What was that?” he said, starting.

A moment I waited, to let her show herself if she chose.  But the mudhouse was silent again.

“It was some boy in the wood,” I answered.

“Good-bye,” he said, trying to smile.

Had I let him go, here would have been the end of his love story, but that piteous smile unmanned me, and I could not keep the words back.

“She is in Nanny’s house,” I cried.

In another moment these two were together for weal or woe, and I had set off dizzily for the school-house, feeling now that I had been false to Margaret, and again exulting in what I had done.  By and by the bell stopped, and Gavin and Babbie regarded it as little as I heeded the burns now crossing the glen road noisily at places that had been dry two hours before.

CHAPTER XXIX.

STORY OF THE EGYPTIAN.

God gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should dare to ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after saying “Thank God” so curtly that it is only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again within the hour.  Gavin was to be satisfied if he were told that no evil had befallen her he loved, and all the way between the school-house and Windyghoul Babbie craved for no more than Gavin’s life.  Now they had got their desires; but do you think they were content?

The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard Gavin speak of her.  It was her way of preventing herself from running to him.  Then, when she thought him gone, he opened the door.  She rose and shrank back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad cry.  His disappointed arms met on nothing.

“You, too, heard that I was dead?” he said, thinking her strangeness but grief too sharply turned to joy.

There were tears in the word with which she answered him, and he would have kissed her, but she defended her face with her hand.