Gavin’s appetite returned.

“Has she been seen since the soldiers went away?” he asked, laying down his spoon with a new fear.  “Where is she now?”

“No human eye has seen her,” Jean answered impressively.  “Whaur is she now?  Whaur does the flies vanish to in winter?  We ken they’re some gait, but whaur?”

“But what are the people saying about her?”

“Daft things,” said Jean.  “Old Charles Yuill gangs the length o’ hinting that she’s dead and buried.”

“She could not have buried herself, Jean,” Margaret said, mildly.

“I dinna ken.  Charles says she’s even capable o’ that.”

Then Jean retired reluctantly (but leaving the door ajar) and Gavin fell to on his porridge.  He was now so cheerful that Margaret wondered.

“If half the stories about this gypsy be true,” she said, “she must be more than a mere woman.”

“Less, you mean, mother,” Gavin said, with conviction.  “She is a woman, and a sinful one.”

“Did you see her, Gavin?”

“I saw her.  Mother, she flouted me!”

“The daring tawpie!” exclaimed Margaret.

“She is all that,” said the minister.

“Was she dressed just like an ordinary gypsy body?  But you don’t notice clothes much, Gavin.”

“I noticed hers,” Gavin said, slowly, “she was in a green and red, I think, and barefooted.”

“Ay,” shouted Jean from the kitchen, startling both of them; “but she had a lang grey-like cloak too.  She was seen jouking up closes in’t.”

Gavin rose, considerably annoyed, and shut the parlour door.

“Was she as bonny as folks say?” asked Margaret.  “Jean says they speak of her beauty as unearthly.”

“Beauty of her kind,” Gavin explained learnedly, “is neither earthly nor heavenly.”  He was seeing things as they are very clearly now.  “What,” he said, “is mere physical beauty?  Pooh!”

“And yet,” said Margaret, “the soul surely does speak through the face to some extent.”

“Do you really think so, mother?” Gavin asked, a little uneasily.

“I have always noticed it,” Margaret said, and then her son sighed.

“But I would let no face influence me a jot,” he said, recovering.

“Ah, Gavin, I’m thinking I’m the reason you pay so little regard to women’s faces.  It’s no natural.”

“You’ve spoilt me, you see, mother, for ever caring for another woman.  I would compare her to you, and then where would she be?”

“Sometime,” Margaret said, “you’ll think differently.”

“Never,” answered Gavin, with a violence that ended the conversation.

Soon afterwards he set off for the town, and in passing down the garden walk cast a guilty glance at the summer-seat.  Something black was lying in one corner of it.  He stopped irresolutely, for his mother was nodding to him from her window.  Then he disappeared into the little arbour.  What had caught his eye was a Bible.  On the previous day, as he now remembered, he had been called away while studying in the garden, and had left his Bible on the summer-seat, a pencil between its pages.  Not often probably had the Egyptian passed a night in such company.