So Ralph Peden stepped out into the night, the sense of injustice quick upon him.  He had no plans, but only the quick resentments of youth, and the resolve to stay no longer in a house where he was an unwelcome guest.  He felt that he had been offered the choice between his career and unfaithfulness to the girl who had trusted him.  This was not quite so; but, with the characteristic one-sidedness of youth, that was the way that he put the case to himself.

It was the water-shed of day and night when Ralph set out from the Dullarg manse.  He had had no supper, but he was not hungry.  Naturally his feet carried him in the direction of the bridge, whither he had gone on the previous evening and where amid an eager press of thoughts he had waited and watched for his love.  When he got there he sat down on the parapet and looked to the north.  He saw the wimples of the lazy Grannoch Lane winding dimly through their white lily beds.  In the starlight the white cups glimmered faintly up from their dark beds of leaves.  Underneath the bridge there was only a velvety blackness of shadow.

What to do was now the question.  Plainly he must at once go to Edinburgh, and see his father.  That was the first certainty.  But still more certainly he must first see Winsome, and, in the light of the morning and of her eyes, solve for her all the questions which must have sorely puzzled her, at the same time resolving his own perplexities.  Then he must bid her adieu.  Right proudly would he go to carve out a way for her.  He had no doubts that the mastership in his old school, which Dr. Abel had offered him a month ago, would still be at his disposal.  That Winsome loved him truly he did not doubt.  He gave no thought to that.  The cry across the gulf of air from the high march dyke by the pines on the hill, echoing down to the bridge in the valley of the Grannoch, had settled that question once for all.

As he sat on the bridge and listened to the ripple of the Grannoch lane running lightly over the shallows at the Stepping Stones, and to the more distant roar of the falls of the Black Water, he shaped out a course for himself and for Winsome.  He had ceased to call her Winsome Charteris.  “She,” he called her—­the only she.  When next he gave her a surname he would call her Winsome Peden.  Instinctively he took off his hat at the thought, as though he had opened a door and found himself light-heartedly and suddenly in a church.

Sitting thus on the bridge alone and listening to the ocean-like lapse of his own thoughts, as they cast up the future and the past like pebbles at his feet, he had no more thought of fear for his future than he had that first day at Craig Ronald, under the whin-bushes on the ridge behind him, on that day of the blanket-washing so many ages ago.  He was so full of love that it had cast out fear.

Suddenly out of the gloom beneath the bridge upon which he was sitting, dangling his legs, there came a voice.