mark like froth on the knees of a
horse. To the pebbly ford above the "Waulk Mill" came Bryde, riding
loosely with slack rein, for he was thinking much these days. In the
burn his horse halted to drink, and then rested a little from the
water--his head high and his ears forward--Bryde looking to his path
for the South End, for he was on some errand of grazing beasts. Then
there came that fine sound, the distant neigh of a horse, and the horse
in the burn answered gallantly, and came splashing on, passaging and
side-stepping a little, with curved crest. And there by the burnside
they met, Bryde and Helen.

Their words at the meeting were formal enough, for there were houses at
a little distance from the crossing; but you will only be seeing the
founds of them now, and the plum-trees gone to wood, and the straggling
hawthorns and the heather growing to the very burnside by the
Lagavile.[1] But at the meeting there was a rich glowing colour in the
face of the maid, and her lips were parted in a little smile, and her
great eyes, sombre often, but now alight with love a-laughing in them,
rested on the man like a caress.

"Ha, well met, my swarthy dragoon," said she, "or are we sailors this
merry morning?"

"There's aye the night for dreams, Mistress Helen, but in the daytime I
will be but a plain farming body, concerned about bestial. . . ."

"Bestial," quo' she, as they rode in the old track by the burnside that
you'll see yet from the other road, "my horse is a-lathered, and I too
am concerned about bestial. We will let us down," said she, "in the
shade yonder, and rest the horses, and be good farmers together--yes?"

Bryde slacked the girths and tied the horses, and then joined the lass
on a little mound of green like a couch.

"And now," cried Helen Stockdale--"now, sir, here are we in the green
wood with neither page nor groom--squire and dame--and I am loving it,"
said she, and her little brown capable hand took one of his great hard
ones.

[1] Laga vile=hollow of the tree.

"You have fine hands, M'sieu Bryde," said she, her fingers over his to
be comparing them, "great and strong and well-tried."

And there fell a silence between them, and as both strove to break that
silence their eyes met, and there came a quick changing of colour on
the face of Helen, and Bryde's hand closed over hers. And as she sat
by his side her eyes lowered, and the curling lashes sweeping her
cheek, it came to the man