“You have never seen her since that night?”
Gavin asked me, without hope in his voice.
Had he been less hopeless he would have wondered why
I did not reply immediately. I was looking covertly
at the mudhouse, of which we were now within a few
yards. Babbie’s face had gone from the
window, and. the door remained shut. That she
could hear every word we uttered now, I could not
doubt. But she was hiding from the man for whom
her soul longed. She was sacrificing herself for
him.
“Never,” I answered, notwithstanding my
pity of the brave girl, and then while I was shaking
lest he should go in to visit Nanny, I heard the echo
of the Auld Licht bell.
“That calls me to the meeting for rain,”
Gavin said, bidding me good-night. I had acted
for Margaret, and yet I had hardly the effrontery
to take his hand. I suppose he saw sympathy in
my face, for suddenly the cry broke from him—
“If I could only know that nothing evil had
befallen her!”
Babbie heard him and could not restrain a heartbreaking
sob.
“What was that?” he said, starting.
A moment I waited, to let her show herself if she
chose. But the mudhouse was silent again.
“It was some boy in the wood,” I answered.
“Good-bye,” he said, trying to smile.
Had I let him go, here would have been the end of
his love story, but that piteous smile unmanned me,
and I could not keep the words back.
“She is in Nanny’s house,” I cried.
In another moment these two were together for weal
or woe, and I had set off dizzily for the school-house,
feeling now that I had been false to Margaret, and
again exulting in what I had done. By and by
the bell stopped, and Gavin and Babbie regarded it
as little as I heeded the burns now crossing the glen
road noisily at places that had been dry two hours
before.
God gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should
dare to ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after
saying “Thank God” so curtly that it is
only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again within
the hour. Gavin was to be satisfied if he were
told that no evil had befallen her he loved, and all
the way between the school-house and Windyghoul Babbie
craved for no more than Gavin’s life. Now
they had got their desires; but do you think they were
content?
The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard
Gavin speak of her. It was her way of preventing
herself from running to him. Then, when she thought
him gone, he opened the door. She rose and shrank
back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad
cry. His disappointed arms met on nothing.
“You, too, heard that I was dead?” he
said, thinking her strangeness but grief too sharply
turned to joy.
There were tears in the word with which she answered
him, and he would have kissed her, but she defended
her face with her hand.
