on!" he said (and
still in the melancholy and quiet of the place we talked in whispers).

"Could you not give a call, a signal?" he asked; and I had mind of the
call I had once taught her, the doleful pipe of the curlew.

I gave it with hesitancy to the listening night. It came back an echo
from the hills, but brought no other answer.

A wild bird roosting somewhere in the ruined house flapped out by the
door and over us. I am not a believer in the ghostly--at least to the
extent of some of our people; yet I was alarmed, till my reason came to
me and the badinage of the professors at college, who had twitted me on
my fears of the mischancy. But M'Iver clutched me by the shoulder in a
frenzy of terror. I could hear his teeth chittering as if he had come
out of the sea.

"Name of God!" he cried, "what was yon?"

"But a night-hag," said I.

He was ashamed of his weakness; but the night, as he said, had too many
holes in it for his fancy.

And so we went on again across the hill-face in the sombre gloaming. It
was odd that the last time I had walked on this hillside had been for
a glimpse of that same girl we sought to-night. Years ago, when I was a
lad, she had on a summer been sewing with a kinswoman in Car-lunnan, the
mill croft beside a linn of the river, where the salmon plout in a most
wonderful profusion, and I had gone at morning to the hill to watch her
pass up and down in the garden of the mill, or feed the pigeons at the
round doo-cot, content (or wellnigh content) to see her and fancy the
wind in her tresses, the song at her lip. In these mornings the animals
of the hill and the wood and I were friendly; they guessed somehow,
perhaps, no harm was in my heart: the young roes came up unafraid,
almost to my presence, and the birds fluttered like comrades about me,
and the little animals that flourish in the wild dallied boldly in my
path. It was a soft and tranquil atmosphere, it was a world (I think
now) very happy and unperplexed. And at evening, after a hurried meal,
I was off over the hills to this brae anew, to watch her who gave me
an unrest of the spirit, unappeasable but precious. I think, though
the mornings were sweet, 'twas the eve that was sweeter still. All the
valley would be lying soundless and sedate, the hills of Salachary
and the forest of Creag Dubh purpling in the setting sun, a rich gold
tipping Dunchuach like a thimble. Then the eastern woods filled with
dark caverns of shade, wherein