Then they fell again to the talking, while I noted how the maids comported themselves. The eldest of them and the tallest, was a lass of mettle, with dark, bent brows. She held her head high, and seemed, by her attiring and dignity, accustomed to other places than this moorland farm-town. Yet here she was, handing victual like a servitor, before a field-preaching. And this I was soon to learn was a common thing in Galloway, where nearly the whole of the gentry, and still more of their wives and daughters, were on the side of the Covenant. It was no uncommon thing for a King's man, when he was disturbing a conventicle--"skailing a bees' byke" as it was called--to come on his own wife's or, it might be, his daughter's palfrey, tethered in waiting to the root of some birk-tree. "Keep your black-tail coats closer in by!" said Duke Rothes once to his lady, who notoriously harboured outed preachers, "or I shall have to do some of them a hurt! Ca' your messans to your foot, else I'll hae to kennel them for ye!" There was however no such safe hiding as in some of the great houses of the strict persecutors. So in a little while, the most part of the company going out, this tall, dark-browed maid was made known to us by Matthew of the Dub, as Mistress Kate McGhie, daughter of the Laird of Balmaghie, within which parish we were. Then Maisie Lennox beckoned to the third maid, and she came forward with shyness and grace. She was younger than the other two, and seemed to be a well-grown lass of thirteen or fourteen. "This," said Maisie Lennox, "is my cousin Margaret of Glen Vernock." The maid whom she so named blushed, and spoke to us in the broader accent of the Shire, yet pleasantly and frankly as one well reared. Presently there came to us the taller maid--she who was called Kate, the Laird's daughter. She held out her hand to me. "Ah, Will of Earlstoun, I have heard of you!" I answered that I hoped it was for good. "It was from Maisie there that I heard it," she said, which indeed told me nothing. But Kate McGhie shook her head at us, which tempted me to think her a flighty maid. However, I remembered her words often afterwards when I was in hiding. Thereupon I presented my cousin Wat to her, and they bowed to one another with a very courtly grace. I declare it was pretty to see them, and also most strange in a house where the hill-folk were gathered together. But for the sake of my father and brother we were never so much as questioned. Presently there was one came to the door, and cried that the preaching was called and about to begin. So we took our bonnets and the maids their shawls about them, and set forth. It was a grey, unkindly day, and the clouds hung upon the heights. There are many woods of pine and oak about the Duchrae; and we went through one of them to an ancient moat-hill or place of defence on a hillside, with a ditch about it of three or four yards wideness, which overlooked the narrow pack road by the water's edge.