I had done better to think of the road.  I found the Howe Burn readily enough, and scrambled up its mossy bottom.  By this time the day was wearing late, and the mist was deepening into the darker shades of night.  It is an eery business to be out on the hills at such a season, for they are deathly quiet except for the lashing of the storm.  You will never hear a bird cry or a sheep bleat or a weasel scream.  The only sound is the drum of the rain on the peat or its plash on a boulder, and the low surge of the swelling streams.  It is the place and time for dark deeds, for the heart grows savage; and if two enemies met in the hollow of the mist only one would go away.

I climbed the hill above the Howe burn-head, keeping the wind on my right cheek as the girl had ordered.  That took me along a rough ridge of mountain pitted with peat-bogs into which I often stumbled.  Every minute I expected to descend and find the young Water of Leith, but if I held to my directions I must still mount.  I see now that the wind must have veered to the south-east, and that my plan was leading me into the fastnesses of the hills; but I would have wandered for weeks sooner than disobey the word of the girl who sang in the rain.  Presently I was on a steep hill-side, which I ascended only to drop through a tangle of screes and jumper to the mires of a great bog.  When I had crossed this more by luck than good guidance, I had another scramble on the steeps where the long, tough heather clogged my footsteps.

About eight o’clock I awoke to the conviction that I was hopelessly lost, and must spend the night in the wilderness.  The rain still fell unceasingly through the pit-mirk, and I was as sodden and bleached as the bent I trod on.  A night on the hills had no terrors for me; but I was mortally cold and furiously hungry, and my temper grew bitter against the world.  I had forgotten the girl and her song, and desired above all things on earth a dry bed and a chance of supper.

I had been plunging and slipping in the dark mosses for maybe two hours when, looking down from a little rise, I caught a gleam of light.  Instantly my mood changed to content.  It could only be a herd’s cottage, where I might hope for a peat fire, a bicker of brose, and, at the worst, a couch of dry bracken.

I began to run, to loosen my numbed limbs, and presently fell headlong over a little scaur into a moss-hole.  When I crawled out, with peat plastering my face and hair, I found I had lost my notion of the light’s whereabouts.  I strove to find another hillock, but I seemed now to be in a flat space of bog.  I could only grope blindly forwards away from the moss-hole, hoping that soon I might come to a lift in the hill.