“Mr. Alexander, how are the laird and the leddy?”

“They’re very well, Mother.”

“Ye’ll be gaeing sune to Edinburgh?  Wha may be this laddie?”

“It is Ian Rullock, of Black Hill.”

“Sae the baith o’ ye are gaeing to Edinburgh?  Will ye be friends there?”

“That we will!”

“Hech, sirs!” Mother Binning drew a thread from her distaff.  The two were about to travel on when she stopped them again with a gesture.  “Dinna mak sic haste!  There’s time enough behind us, and time enough before us.  And it’s a strange warld, and a large, and an auld!  Sit ye and crack a bit with an auld wife by the road.”

But they had dallied at White Farm and in the cave, and Alexander was in haste.

“We cannot stop now, Mother.  We’re bound for the Kelpie’s Pool.”

“And why do ye gae there?  That’s a drear, wanrestfu’ place!” said Mother Binning.

“Ian has not seen it yet.  I want to show it to him.”

Mother Binning turned her distaff slowly.  “Eh, then, if ye maun gae, gae!...  We’re a’ ane!  There’s the kelpie pool for a’.”

“We’ll stop a bit on the way back,” said Alexander.  He spoke in a wheedling, kindly voice, for he and Mother Binning were good friends.

“Do that then,” she said.  “I hae a hansel o’ coffee by me.  I’ll mak twa cups, for I’ll warrant that ye’ll baith need it!”

The air was indeed growing colder when the two came at last upon the moor that ran down to the Kelpie’s Pool.  Furze and moss and ling, a wild country stretched around without trees or house or moving form.  The bare sunshine took on a remote, a cool and foreign, aspect.  The small singing of the wind in whin and heather came from a thin, eery world.  Down below them they saw the dark little tarn, the Kelpie’s Pool.  It was very clear, but dark, with a bottom of peat.  Around it grew rushes and a few low willows.  The two sat upon an outcropping of stone and gazed down upon it.

“It’s a gey lonely place,” said Alexander.  “Now I like it as well or better than I do the cave, and now I would leave it far behind me!”

“I like the cave best.  This is a creepy place.”

“Once I let myself out at Glenfernie without any knowing and came here by night.”

Ian felt emulation.  “Oh, I would do that, too, if there was any need!  Did you see anything?”

“Do you mean the kelpie?”

“Yes.”

“No.  I saw something—­once.  But that time I wanted to see how the stars looked in the water.”

Ian looked at the water, that lay like a round mirror, and then to the vast shell of the sky above.  He, too, had love of beauty—­a more sensuous love than Alexander’s, but love.  This shared perception made one of the bonds between them.

“It was as still—­much stiller than it is to-day!  The air was clear and the night dark and grand.  I looked down, and there was the Northern Crown, clasp and all.”