She glanced at his companion and started as if in fear, shivered, put out a hand and bade her welcome home. “Dear me! Miss Nan,” said she, “amn’t I proud to see you back? What a tall lady you have grown, and so like--so like----” She stopped embarrassed. Her hand had gone with an excess of kindness upon the girl’s arm ere she remembered all that lay between them and the heyday of another Nan than this. Of Gilian she seemed to take no notice, which much surprised him with a sense of something wanting. At last they parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster’s house. CHAPTER XXVII--ALARM Nan’s uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature’s caprice with sheep and crop, man’s injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons, nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life’s dolours, would be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard--a fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man’s face--he looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable, then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more than ever.