And into a meeting of this kind, when the evening was well on, came Hugh McBride, and there was the great scraping of chairs and stools back from the fire, and Belle would have been putting a fire in a better room; but Dan had been too long in the field for these capers, for all that Hugh would be Laird and very grand above common folk. Dan waved him to a chair in his polite way, and made him very welcome. But Hugh was not seeing chairs that night, much less sitting quietly. There was a sparkle in his eye and a flush on his cheeks, and his smile was for everybody, and when the lave of the folk were on the road he told us the news.
"Mistress Helen will be having me," says he. "Och, I will have been singing every love-song I was remembering since I left the gate at Scaurdale."
And we made a great "to-do" about it, and we were not any the better maybe for what we drank to his luck, and the lass's luck; and on the hill-road home he was at the singing again.
"She is a fine lass, Hamish--my wife that will be; is she no'?"
"For a while--a long while the night,--it was in my mind that she would not be caring to have me, for she has the wale of brisk Ayrshire lads to pick from, and she swithered long."
"'We were babies together,' says she, 'in your mother's house?'
"'And Bryde, he was not born yet--Bryde, your relative?'"
"He was born in the hill house yonder, beside the 'three lonely ones,' Helen."
"'Three lonely ones, Hugh,' said she, very low--'three lonely ones. I feel it in my bones that always there will be three lonely ones.'
"Till the frost and the rain of a million years level the hills," said I.
"'A million years, Hugh! It is long to wait.'
"It will not be so long as I have waited, Helen; and she smiled at that, Hamish, and then--
"'You have a very old name in this place, my guardian says.'
"'Then,' said she, 'I think--I think I will be, what they say, "all in the family."'"
"I am not sure," said he, "but I ken that John o' Scaurdale and my father are set on a weddin', and the lass kens it too, and I am thinking it is the land she is thinking of; it will be all in the family when we make a match of it."
"Just that," said I; but in my mind there was another thought that I never was telling, and this was it--