d made him very welcome. But
Hugh was not seeing chairs that night, much less sitting quietly.
There was a sparkle in his eye and a flush on his cheeks, and his smile
was for everybody, and when the lave of the folk were on the road he
told us the news.

"Mistress Helen will be having me," says he. "Och, I will have been
singing every love-song I was remembering since I left the gate at
Scaurdale."

And we made a great "to-do" about it, and we were not any the better
maybe for what we drank to his luck, and the lass's luck; and on the
hill-road home he was at the singing again.

"She is a fine lass, Hamish--my wife that will be; is she no'?"

"A fine lass."

"For a while--a long while the night,--it was in my mind that she would
not be caring to have me, for she has the wale of brisk Ayrshire lads
to pick from, and she swithered long."

"'We were babies together,' says she, 'in your mother's house?'

"I heard tell of that from my mother."

"'And Bryde, he was not born yet--Bryde, your relative?'"

"He was born in the hill house yonder, beside the 'three lonely ones,'
Helen."

"'Three lonely ones, Hugh,' said she, very low--'three lonely ones. I
feel it in my bones that always there will be three lonely ones.'

"Till the frost and the rain of a million years level the hills," said
I.

"'A million years, Hugh! It is long to wait.'

"It will not be so long as I have waited, Helen; and she smiled at
that, Hamish, and then--

"'You have a very old name in this place, my guardian says.'

"Ay, an old name, Helen.

"'Then,' said she, 'I think--I think I will be, what they say, "all in
the family."'"

"What would she mean by that, Hugh?"

"I am not sure," said he, "but I ken that John o' Scaurdale and my
father are set on a weddin', and the lass kens it too, and I am
thinking it is the land she is thinking of; it will be all in the
family when we make a match of it."

"Just that," said I; but in my mind there was another thought that I
never was telling, and this was it--

Mistress Helen was thinking that Bryde would never have Margaret,
because of a fault that was none of his making, and that would leave
two lonely ones; and maybe, too, she was thinking that she herself
would never be having Bryde (for another reason), and that would make
three lonely ones. As for being all in the family--well, if she could
not be having Bryde, she could be having his cousin, and I'm thinking
that not the half o