By this time Bell had finished with her clinking pails. She was in the kitchen, still moving about, frying the cold potatoes into a savoury mess, with which Sandy and she were about to regale themselves. Where Bell’s strong shoes were, and her hearty voice, not to speak of Sandy’s, which was very deep bass, there could scarcely be stillness in the house; but when the kitchen door was closed, and the two (who were sweethearts) talked lower, the spell of the quiet grew strong upon Jeanie. She put down her seam, and stole out very quietly to the door, which still stood innocently open; for at the Castle Farm they feared no evil. If you could but have seen her, no prettier figure ever watched for a tardy lover. She was dressed in a plain little brown frock, without any furbelows, with a little rim of white collar round her neck. Her golden hair was fastened up with a large tortoise-shell comb, thought “very old-fashioned” by all the girls about Loch Arroch, which had belonged to Jeanie’s mother, and of which, as a valuable article, costing originally “more than a pound-note,” as her grandmother had often told her, Jeanie was proud. The comb was scarcely visible in the soft bright mass of hair, which Jeanie had not neglected to twist up in its abundance into some semblance of “the fashion.” She leant against the doorway with her chin propped in the hollow of her hand, and one folded arm supporting the elbow of the other. The stars shone high over head, high up above the big summit of Benvohrlan, which shut out from her half the heavens. The moon was behind, silvering over the red roof of the house, and falling glorious upon the dark water, making it one sheet of silver from where it opened out of the bigger loch up to the very foot of the mountain. The side of Benvohrlan was almost as light as in the day-time, and Loch Long on the other turn of the gigantic corner formed by the hill, went gleaming away into invisible space, betraying itself in undefinable distance by here and there a line or speck of silver. All up the loch side, at Jeanie’s left hand, the path lay clear and vacant, without a shadow on it. On the other side, the glimmering lightness of the stubble field, with its sheaves looking like strange animals in the moonlight, extended to the water edge, rounding out to where it too gained the margin of the parent loch. I do not know any finer combination of hill and water. The level fields of the Castle Farm on one side, and Big Benvohrlan on the other, form the doorway by which the lesser loch enters the greater; on one side an angle of cultivated land: on the other a gigantic angle of mountain. But little Jeanie thought little of the familiar scene around her. The moon, newly risen, cast a soft shadow of her little figure, the same way as her heart went, upon the road from the loch-head by which Edgar was coming. He saw this shadow with a little impatient vexation as he approached the house, but not till long after little Jeanie’s heart