She had the window wide open now; she leaned out on her arms ready to descend; the last rung of the ladder was a foot lower than the sill of the window; she looked in perplexity at her cavalier, for it was impossible to put much of grace into an emergence and a descent like this. “I am just coming,” she said, but still she made no other move, and he held up the lantern for her to sec the better. “Well, be careful!” he advised, and he thought how delightful it was to have the right to say so much. “O Gilian!” she said helplessly, “you are far from gleg.” He gazed ludicrously uncomprehending at her, and in his sense of almost conjugal right to the girl failed to realise her delicacy. “Go round to the barn and make sure that Duncan is not moving; he’s the only one I fear,” she said. “Leave the lantern.” He did as he was told; he put the lantern on the ground; he went round again to the barn, put his head in, and satisfied himself that his seaman was still musical aloft. Then he hurried back. He found the lantern swinging on Nan’s finger, and her composed upon the ground, to which she had made a speedy descent whenever he had disappeared. “Oh! I wanted to help you,” said he. “Did you?” said she, looking for a sign of the humorist, but he was as solemn as a sermon. They might have been extremely sedate in Miss Simpson’s school in Edinburgh, but at that moment Miss Nan would have forgiven some apparent appreciation of her cleverness in getting him out of the way while she came feet first through a window. They stood for a moment in expectancy, as if something was going to happen, she still holding the lantern, trembling a little, as it might be with the cold, he with her bundle under his arm pressed affectionately. “And--and--do we just go on?” she asked suggestively. “The quicker the better,” said he, but he made no movement to depart, for his mind was in the house of Maam, and he felt the father’s sorrow and alarm at an empty bed, a daughter gone. She put out an arm, flushing in the dark as she did so, as if to place it on his neck, but drew back and put the lantern fast behind her, lest her fervour had been noticed by the ironic and jealous night. He, she saw, could not notice; the thing was not in his mind. “In the stories they just move off, then?” said she shyly. “There was the meeting, the meeting--no more, and they just went away?” “And the sooner the better,” said he, again leading the way at last, after taking the lantern from her, and “John Hielan’man, John Hielan’man!” she cried vexatiously within. She followed, pouting her lips in the darkness. “It’s quite different from what I expected,” she said, whispering as they passed the front door and down by the burn.