Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and AdventureMunro, Neil
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Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure
Munro, Neil
Highlands (Scotland) -- Fiction
“But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very
particularly in Miss Simpson’s, I can assure you.” This with a prim
tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer
would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with
an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was
with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing
him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the
policies.
They reached the Lady’s Linn, but did not repeat old history to the
extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested
it in a momentary boldness.
“No, no,” said she. “We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson’s.
And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram’s
stories here; what was it again?”
He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale’s Daughter. She listened
attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him
gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put
into the narrative.
“It is a kind of gruesome fable,” she said when he was done, and she
shuddered slightly. “The other brother was Death, wasn’t he? When you
told it to me last I did not understand.”
They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so
bewildered them before: “After all, it is not a bit like what it was,”
said she. “I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now
I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time.”
“Just so,” he answered, “but you could see over no bushes in those days,
and more’s the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke’s garden
as well as in life, for it’s only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan.”
“Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John
Hielan’man.” But this was to herself.
“Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?”
“The same and not all the same,” he admitted. “I can make it exactly the
same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew
then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer
and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no
difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other
way, some sad way I cannot explain.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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