The tragic end of Anabal Gilchrist, the doom that had fulfilled itself for Torcall Cameron: what was either but apiece with the passing of the ancient language, though none wished it to go; with the exile of the sons, though they would fain live and die where their fathers wooed their mothers; with the coming of strangers, and strange ways, and a new bewildering death-cold spirit, that had no respect for the green graves, and jeered at ancient things and the wisdom of old--strangers whom none had sought, none wished, and whose coming meant the going of even the few hillfolk who prospered in the _màchar_, the fertile meadows and pastures along the mountain bases? _It was to be: it would be._ Among the old there was exceeding bitterness. An angry and a brooding pain frowned in many hearts. But, alas, what good to meet the inevitable with wailing? What had to be, surely would be. Old wifeless men, old childless women, took comfort in that bitter-sweet saying of the Psalmist: "is iad ìobairtean Dhé spiorad briste"--"_the sacrifice of God is a broken spirit_." But, with the harvesting, the Strath-folk forgot for a while the very existence of the mountain-lovers. Smitten with the strange rapt elation of their dream, Alan and Sorcha still went to and fro as though spellbound. Sometimes he herded the cows alone: as before, Sorcha milked the sweet-breath kine, singing low her songs of holy St. Bridget or old-world cadences rare and nigh-forgotten now as the _Fonnsheen_, the fairy melodies once wont to be heard on the hills and in remote places. But, though apart for a brief while, it was only to dream the more. Yet, strange to say, Alan knew in his heart that this could not endure. It could not be for over long: God, soon or late, lays winter upon the heart, as well as upon the song of the bird, the bloom of the flower. Nevertheless, he had no trouble because of this. There is, at times, in deep happiness, a gloom as of dark water filled with sunlight. While the glow is there, a living joy, the gloom is no more than the quiet sorrow of the world. Often, of late, he had noticed upon the hillside, upon brier and bramble, fern-covert or dwarf-elder, that indescribable shadow of light, visible too at full noon in that golden weather as well as at the passing of the sun: that glow of omen, known of Celtic poets and seers in far-gone days. The first line of a fragmentary rune, come down from one of these singers, who walked nearer to nature than does any now among the sons of men, was upon his lips over and over, because of this thing: "_Tha bruaillean air aghaidh nan tom._" "_There is boding gloom on the face of the bushes._" Once only the gloom lay upon him, the gloom that is upon the mind as a dark cloud upon a field of grain. What if ill should have come to Sorcha?