d her.

"What is the matter?" she asked, checking her walk. "Are you ill? What
is it?"

He supposed that his strange voice would tell her all, but, although she
was evidently puzzled, to his further astonishment, she did not realise
that he was a stranger.

"Why do you speak like that?" she asked. And she talked on rapidly about
some waggon she expected to find at the foot of the path. She went on,
in fact, as if unable to endure the loss of time; and he, thinking of
the waggon and waggoner as a further point of safety for her, ran after.
In a minute they both came out of the lane on a small common. Here were
two horses tied under a tree and an open waggon with its shafts laid
down.

"Call the man," she said.

To Alec's call a man came sleepily from a small barn that was near. He
said he had brought about a dozen women in the waggon, and they had gone
up the hill. Impatiently she demanded of him how long it was since they
had started to walk, and heard it was about a quarter of an hour. She
went on once more, with what seemed to Alec incredible speed. But this
time he gave way to no further indecision. Where she had darted under
the trees he followed in her path.

They were just under the covert of the first trees on a steep footpath
when he stopped her, and above him she turned, listening. The scent of
moss and fern and overhanging leaf was sweet. So perfect a woodland
bower was the place, so delicate did the lady seem to his imagination,
that he wished he could tell his concern for her alarm and readiness to
devote himself to her cause. But when he saw her shrink from him, he
could only stand awkwardly, tell her in a few clumsy words that he and
the other man had changed places, he did not know how, and he had
thought to take her to the farm.

"Your voice is very like his," she said, looking at him strangely.

But he now knew certainly, what for the last hour had seemed to him
almost impossible, that in very truth the religious assembly was to take
place that night; and the thought of it, and of the strange excitement
with which others had gone before them on that same path took from Alec,
and, he supposed, from the lady also, the power to give much
consideration to their own strange encounter. When he had told her of
the time he had seen old Cameron at prayer in the lone wintry fields,
and how far he had just walked to see him again in the strange
conditions of to-night, they climbed on together.

C