r John alone knew her guilty secret.
She hastily promised to take the jar the very next day, and managed to
get the conversation back to the Harebell, which in time showed its shy
self and was set down in the essay.

It was nearly a week before Christina managed to get away on her
difficult errand. She did not want to go, certainly, but she was
afraid of attracting more comment from John and Uncle Neil by staying.

It was a golden September day when she went up over the hills with a
basket of apples from their best tree, and the special jar of her
mother's black currant jelly. The air was motionless, the sky a
perfect soft unclouded blue, the hills were amber, the hollows
amethyst. The branches of the orchard trees behind the village houses
sagged, heavy with their harvest, and gay as orchards gotten up for a
garden party, all hung with fairy lantern globes of yellow and red.
The gardens were filled with ripened corn and great golden pumpkins.
The wild asters along the fences glowed softly purple.

Christina stepped over the warm yellow stubble singing, and climbed the
hill to the old berry patch, where the briars grew more riotously every
year. Gavin's cows were straying through the green and yellow tangle
on his side of the fence and a bell rang musically through the still
aisles. The Wizard of Autumn had been up here on the hills with his
paints and had touched the sumachs along the fences till they looked
like trees of flame. And he had been working on a bit of woodbine that
now draped the old rail fence as with a scarlet curtain. A blue jay
flashed through the golden silence waking the echoes with his noisy
laughter and the flickers high up in the dead stumps called jeeringly
to each other.

Christina came out of the Slash into the yellow sunshine of Gavin's
fields, and as she did so, she suddenly dropped down behind the
raspberry bushes that fringed the fence, quite in a panic. For a loud
musical voice arose from the field just beyond the brow of the hill,
Gavin was ploughing the back meadow and singing, and the song made
Christina's heart heat hotly:

"Will ye gang to the Hielan's, Leezie Lindsay?
Will ye gang to the Hielan's wi' me?"

Hidden by the hill, and the screening bushes, she slipped away and took
a devious course down the valley. But there was a lump in her throat
as she went.

She ran past a clump of cedars and came out into view of
Craig-Ellachie. The Grant Girls had given the