"Hamish," said Walter, "you think I am out of my mind: but you are mistaken, my good fellow. _I_ think you have saved my life, and I will not forget it. What was that you said about Miss Oona?"
Hamish looked earnestly into the young man's face.
"My lord," he began with hesitation, "you see--if a young gentleman is a thocht out of the way, and just maybe excited about something and no altogether his ain man--what's that to the like of me? Never a hair o' hairm would that do to Hamish. But when it's a leddy, and young and real tender-hearted! We maun aye think o' them, my lord, and spare them--the weemen. No, it's what we dinna do--they have the warst in a general way to bear. But atween you and me, my lord, that though you're far my shuperior, are just man and man----"
"It is you that are my superior, Hamish," said Lord Erradeen; "but look at me now and say if you think I am mad. You have saved me. I am fit to speak to her now. Do you think I would harm her? Not for anything in the world."
"No if you were--yoursel'--Lord Erradeen."
"But I am--myself. And the moment has come when I must know. Take my hand, Hamish; look at me. Do you think I am not to be trusted with Oona?"
"My lord, to make Hamish your judge, what's that but daft too? And what right have ye to call my young leddy by her name? You're no a drap's blood to them, nor even a great friend."
Oona's faithful guardian stood lowering his brows upon the young lord with a mingled sense of the superiority of his office, and of disapproval, almost contemptuous, of the madman who had given it to him. That he should make Hamish the judge was mad indeed. And yet Hamish was the judge, standing on his right to defend his mistress. They stood looking at each other, the boatman holding his shaggy head high, reading the other's face with the keenest scrutiny. But just then there came a soft sound into the air, a call from the bank, clear, with that tone, not loud but penetrating, which mountaineers use everywhere.
Oona's mind had been much disturbed, yet in no painful way, by the meeting with Mrs. Methven. The service which she had done to Walter's mother, the contact with her, although almost in the dark, the sense of approach to another woman whose mind was full of anxiety and thought for him, agitated her, yet seemed to heal and soften away the pain which other encounters had given her. It gave her pleasure to think of the half-seen face, made softer by the twilight, and of the tremor of expectation and anxiety that had been in it. There was somehow in this a kind of excuse to herself for her involuntary preoccupation with all that concerned him. She had felt that there was an unspoken sympathy between her and the stranger, and that it was something more than chance which brought them together. As the boat pushed off into the loch, and she felt she had left the mother to a certain happiness in her son, her heart beat with a subdued excitement. She felt with them both, divining the soul of the mother who came to him with trembling, not approving perhaps, not fully trusting, but loving; and of the son who was at fault, who had not shown her the tenderness which her love merited in return. The sense of that union so incomplete in fact, and so close in nature, filled Oona with emotion. As the boat glided along the glittering pathway of the lake between the reflected banks, her mind was full of the two who had gone away together arm and arm into the soft darkness. How mysterious was that twilight world, the eye incapable in the dimness of perceiving which was the substance and which the shadow of those floating woods and islands! Sometimes the boat would glide into the tangled reflections of the trees, sometimes strike through what seemed a headland, a wall of rock, a long projecting promontory in this little world of water, where nothing was as it seemed. But it was not half so mysterious as life. It was but lately that this aspect of existence had struck the healthful soul of the Highland girl. Till the last year all had been open and sweet as the day about her ways and thoughts. If she had any secrets at all they had been those which even the angels guard between themselves and God, those sacred enthusiasms for the one Love that is above all: those aspirations towards the infinite which are the higher breath of gentle souls; or perhaps a visionary opening into the romance of life in its present form, which was scarcely less visionary and pure. But nothing else, nothing more worldly, nothing that her namesake, "heavenly Una with her milkwhite lamb," need have hesitated to avow.