He shook himself into the present world, and left behind the ashes of their fire and made for the shealing hut, all the way solacing himself with fancy. The girl was his, but he never let his mind linger on the numerous difficulties that lay inevitably between the present hour and his possession of her. He projected himself into the future with a blank unexplained behind, and saw them at unextinguishable hearths, love accompanying them through generations. Through the heather he brushed eagerly now, his eyes intent upon the dim summits of the brae from which again he should see the light of the shealing if it was there. Loch Little Fox, and Great Fox, and all the black and sobbing pools among the heather he passed on the light feet of love, and when he came to the brae top and still found no beacon there, he was exceedingly dashed. “I hope, I hope there is nothing wrong,” he said aloud. And he hurried the faster. The sky was full of clouds, all but a patch star-sown over Ben Bhreac, and all through the hollows and hags ran a wail of rain-wind most mournful. The birds that had been crying over the pools departed, and there was no sound of animal life. The wind moaned and the pools sobbed. About the black edifice in which he thought was all he prized most dear on earth, blackness hung like a terror. Breathless he stood at the door. It was wide open! It was wide open! It was wide open to the night wind! As if a hand of ice had clutched him at the heart he shook and staggered back. “God of Grace!” he cried in his mother tongue, then “Nan! Nan!” he called to the dark within. There was no answer, and a bird flew out above his head. He cried no more there, but out he ran into the vacant moor and loudly he called to the night, “Nan! Nan!” till his voice seemed to himself some terrific chant of long-dead peoples come first to this strange land and crying for each other in the wilderness where they were lost. “Nan! Nan!” he cried, sometimes entreating, sometimes peremptory, as though she might be hiding in the dark in some childish caprice. “Nan! Nan!” he called plaintively, and he called sharply too and loudly, the possessor. The sides of Ben Bhreac woke to answer “Anan,” as people reply in dreams; and the stars of heaven in their little garden over the hill had no interest whatever in his crying; they hung out cool and imperturbable, and the wind wailed, but not for his anxieties, on the reeds of Little Fox. Then he pressed his hand upon his heart to still its uproar and strained his ears to listen. No sound of a girl’s voice, no foot upon the heather. He could scarcely believe his senses. In his mind, as he approached the house she had seemed as essential a part of it as the sky was portion of the universe, and here she was gone!