poured the water into the pot, from which the steam was rising.  Ralph Peden could see the sunlight sparkle in the water as it arched itself solidly out of the pails.  He was not near enough to see the lilac sprig on her light summer gown; but the lilac sunbonnet which she wore, principally it seemed in order that it might hang by the strings upon her shoulders, was to Ralph a singularly attractive piece of colour in the landscape.  This he did not resent, because it is always safe to admire colour.

Ralph would have been glad to have been able to slip off quietly to the manse.  He told himself so over and over again, till he believed it.  This process is easy.  But he saw very well that he could not rise from the lee of the whin bush without being in full view of this eminently practical and absurdly attractive young woman.  So he turned to his Hebrew Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim contraction of determined brows which recalled his father.  A country girl was nothing to the hunter after curious roots and the amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and Pual.

“I will not be distracted!” Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot, correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant particle through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.

A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.

“Bless me,” said Ralph, startled, “this is most discomposing!”

He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of the water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac sunbonnet in her hand.  She wared it high above her head, then she paused a moment to look right in his direction under her hand held level with her brows.  Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the gorse.  A most revolutionary young person this.  He regretted that the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.

Ralph was deeply shocked that a girl should whistle, and still more that she should use two fingers to do it, for all the world like a shepherd on the hill.  He bethought him that not one of his cousins, Professor Habakkuk Thriepneuk’s daughters (who studied Chaldaeic with their father), would ever have dreamed of doing that.  He imagined their horror at the thought, and a picture, compound of Jemima, Kezia, and Kerenhappuch, rose before him.

Down the hill, out from beneath the dark green solid foliaged elder bushes, there came a rush of dogs.

“Save us,” said Ralph, who saw himself discovered, “the deil’s in the lassie; she’ll have the dogs on me!”—­an expression he had learned from John Bairdison, his father’s “man,” [Footnote:  Church officer and minister’s servant.] who in an unhallowed youth had followed the sea.