The elder might have
been fifteen, the younger thirteen years. They wore their holiday
dresses. Elspeth had a green silken snood, and Gilian a blue. Elspeth
sang as she stepped from stone to stone:
"But I will get a bonny boat,
And I will sail the sea,
For I maun gang to Love Gregor,
Since he canna come hame to me--"
They did not see Strickland where he stood by the hazels. He let them
go by, watching them with a quiet pleasure. They took the
upward-running lane. Hawthorns in bloom hid them; they were gone like
young deer. Strickland, crossing the stream, went his own way.
The country became more open, with, at this hour, a dreamlike depth
and hush. Down went the sun, but a glow held and wrapped the earth in
hues of faery. When he had walked a mile and more he saw before him
Glenfernie House. In the modern and used moiety seventy years old, in
the ancient keep and ruin of a tower three hundred, it crowned--the
ancient and the latter-day--a craggy hill set with dark woods, and
behind it came up like a wonder lantern, like a bubble of pearl, the
full moon.
CHAPTER II
The tutor, in his own room, put down his fisherman's rod and bag. The
chamber was a small one, set high up, with two deep windows tying the
interior to the yet rosy west and the clearer, paler south. Strickland
stood a moment, then went out at door and down three steps and along a
passageway to two doors, one closed, the other open.
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