Without a word, she rose from the chair, wrapped a shawl about her, and then, kissing Lora gently, looked at her with quiet, questioning eyes.
"You still believe that you saw Alastair ... Alastair in the body?"
"Then had you not better take the child with you? I will carry the little one. If he should see it--perhaps he would...."
"You are right, dear friend. God has put that thought into your mind."
A few minutes later, the two women passed out into the cold, fresh morning; Mary going first with the child, and keeping, wherever practicable, to the sheep-paths or to the barren ledges that ran out every here and there from the heather and bracken, and this because of the dews which lay heavily, giving a moon-white sheen to the grass, and sheathing every frond and leaf and twig as with crystal, glistening rainbow-hued.
They took a path that trailed above the hollow of the moonflowers, and led deviously shoreward by the side of Craig-Geal.
When they reached the summit of the grassy brae, where the path diverged, they looked long in every direction. Nowhere could they discern sign of any human being. Not a soul moved upon the upland moors; not a soul moved upon the boulder-strewn, rowan-studded slopes; not a soul moved by the margin of that dead-calm sea, so still that even the whisper of its lip was inaudible, though the faint aerial echo of the crooning of its primeval slumber-song slipped hushfully into the ear.
They were half-way down toward the shore when Mrs. Maclean, holding up a warning hand, stopped.
"What is it, Mary?" Lora whispered. "Do you see anything? Do you see him?"
"Look!" and, as she spoke, Mary pointed to a dip in the little glen.
Under a rowan, heavy with clusters of fruit, as yet of a ruddy brown touched here and there with crimson, a white figure stooped, leaning over one of the pools wherein the falling burn slept and dreamed awhile ere it leaped again from ledge to ledge, or slipped laughing and whispering through time-worn channels.
He was like some beautiful creature of an antique tale. Even as a wild deer, he stooped and drank; looked questioningly through the rowans and birches, and then across the bracken where the sun-rays slid intricately in a golden tangle; then, stooping again, again drank.