pt the shop, and the hostess of the Jardine Arms. And
there was here Jock Binning, who, for all his lameness and his
crutches, could go where he wished.... But it was Gilian, crossing
upon the stepping-stones, who saw Glenfernie coming by the stream with
the covered form in his arms. She met him; they went up the bank to
the house together. She had uttered one cry, but no more.

"The Kelpie's Pool," he had answered.

Jarvis Barrow came out of the door. "Eh! God help us!"

They laid the form upon a bed. All the houseful crowded about. There
was no helping that, and as little might be helped Jenny's
lamentations and the ejaculations of others. It was White Farm
himself who took away the plaid. It lay there before them all, the
drowned form. The face was very quiet, strangely like Elspeth again,
the Elspeth of the springtime. All looked, all saw.

"Gude guide us!" cried Mrs. Macmurdo. "And I wadna be some at the
Judgment Day when come up the beguiled, self-drownit lassies!"

Jock Binning's voice rose from out the craning group. "Aye, and I
ken--and I ken wha was the man!"

White Farm turned upon him. He towered, the old man. A winter wrath
and grief, an icy, scintillant, arctic passion, marked two there, the
laird of Glenfernie and the elder of the kirk. Gilian's grief stood
head-high with theirs, but their anger, the old man's disdaining and
the young man's jealousy, was far from her. In Jarvis Barrow's hand
was the paper, taken from Elspeth, given him by Glenfernie. He turned
upon the cripple. "Wha, then? Wha, then? Speak out!"

He had that power of command that forced an answer. Jock Binning,
crutched and with an elfish face and figure and voice, had pulled down
upon himself the office of revelator. The group swayed a little from
him and he was left facing White Farm and the laird of Glenfernie. He
had a wailing, chanting, elvish manner of speech. Out streamed this
voice:

"'Twere the last of June, twa-three days after the laird rode to
Edinburgh, and she brought my mither a giftie of plums and sat doon
for a crack with her. By he came and stood and talked. Syne the
clouds thickened and the thunder growlit, and he wad walk with her
hame through the glen--"

"Wha wad? Wha?"

"Captain Ian Rullock."

"_Ian Rullock!_"

"Aye, Glenfernie! And after that they never came to my mither's again.
But I marked them aft when they didna mark me, in the glen. Aye, and I
marked them ance in the little glen, and there the