If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was absent, indeed! For he was riding through an air almost jocund, and his spirit sang within him. The burns bubbled merrily among the long grasses and the bracken, the myrtle cast a sharp and tonic sweetness all around. The mountain bens no more pricked the sky in solemn loneliness, but looked one to the other over the plains--companions, lovers, touched to warmth and passion by the sun of the afternoon. It was as if an empty world had been fresh tenanted. Gilian, as he rode up home, woke to wonder at his own cheerfulness. He reflected that he had been called a failure--and he laughed. Next day he was up with the sun, and Cameron was amazed at this new zeal that sent him, crook in hand, to the hill for some wanderers of the flock, whistling blithely as he went. Long after he was gone he could see him, black against the sky, on the backbone of the mountain, not very active for a man in search of sheep. But what he could not see so far was Gilian’s rapture as he looked upon the two glens severed by so many weary miles of roadway, but close together at his feet. And the chimneys of Maam (that looks so like an ancient castle at Dim Loch head) were smoking cheerily below. Looking down upon them he made a pretence to himself after a little that he had just that moment remembered who was now there. He even said the words to himself, “Oh! Nan--Miss Nan is there!” in the tone of sudden recollection, and he flushed in the cold breeze of the lonely mountain, half at the mention of the name, half at his own deceit with himself. He allowed himself to fancy what the girl had grown to in her three years’ absence among Lowland influences, that, by all his reading, must be miraculous indeed. He saw her a little older only than she had been when they sat in the den of the _Jean_ or walked a magic garden, the toss of spate-brown hair longer upon her shoulders, a little more sedateness in her mien. About her still hung the perfume of young birch, and her gown was still no lower than her knees. He met her (still in his imagination upon the hill-top) by some rare chance, in the garden where they had strayed, and his coolness and ease were a marvel to himself. “Miss Nan!” he cried. “They told me you were returned and----” What was to follow of the sentence he could not just now say. She blushed to see him; his hand tingled at the contact with hers. She answered in a pleasant tone of Edinburgh gentility, like Lady Charlotte, and they walked a little way together, conversing wondrously upon life and books and poems, whose secrets they shared between them. He was able to hold her fascinated by the sparkle of his talk; he had never before felt so much the master of himself, and his head fairly hummed with high notions. They talked of their childhood----