For a moment she halted at the bog-verge and looked across the heath. The solitude was splendid from edge to edge of the blue-bellied sky—such solitude as dwarfed her pride and made her heart like a little child’s for simpleness. Moor-birds were clamorous up above her head, and not a half-league off the black pile of Wynyates Kirk upreared itself, a temple in the wilderness. From marsh to kirk, from wind-ruffled heath to peewits wheeling white-and-black across the sun-rays, the girl’s eyes wandered. Proud, she had been, shy with the fierceness of all untamed creatures, and liberty had seemed, till yesterday, a dearer thing than any fool-man’s tenderness. But danger had come to Shameless Wayne, danger would sit at meat and walk abroad and sleep with him till he or the Lean Man went under sod; and, knowing this, she knew, too, that liberty had ceased to be a gift worth asking for. Scarce understanding yet, she turned from the bog-side with a sigh that was half-impatient, and crossed to the kirk which was land-mark and trysting-place in one. They counted the square-towered church at Marshcotes old; yet it was young compared with this rounded pile of stones which was sacred to the oldest-born of all religions. Hither the hill-lassies came on Mickaelmas Eve to ask if they would be wedded before the year was out, and to glean from the silent stone an answer prompted of desire; here, too, sweethearts half confessed found wit to tell each other what many a summer’s field-walk after milking had failed to render clear, and grown men, who had come in jest, had stayed to wonder at the power the old place had to stir a laggard tongue. This Wynyates Kirk, at which Pagan mothers had once worshipped lustily, seemed still to have its message for the moor folk; and the way of a man with a maid, which it had watched for generations out of mind, showed constantly the same. The compulsion of the past was strong on Janet, as she stood under shadow of the rounded stone and strained her eyes toward the track which should be leading Shameless Wayne to her. She had lived with the wind for comrade and the voices of the heath for bed-fellows; there had been none to keep her mind from Nature’s lesson to its children, and here, with the ghosts of long-dead love vows plaining from the heather that hugged the kirk-stone foot, her heart went out once and for all to Shameless Wayne. The spirit of the place quickened in her, telling her that neither kinship nor any reek of feud could come between herself and Wayne; for love was real up here, while pride of family went fluttering like a thistle-seed down the rude pathway of the wind. "He’s a laggard—a laggard!" she cried. "Ah, if he knew what I am keeping from him——"