“Here is the place I was to wait for my father,” said Mary Gordon. “I must arrange my hair, little boy, for my father loves to see me well-ordered, though he is indeed himself most careless in his attiring.” She gave vent to a long sigh, as if her father’s delinquencies of toilette had proved a matter of lifelong sorrow to her. “But then, you see, my father is a great man and does as he pleases.” She put her hand to her brow and looked under the sun this way and that over the moor. “There are so many evil men hereabout--your father may have gone down the further side to escape them,” I said. For I desired to withdraw her gaze from the northern verge of the tableland, where, as I well knew, lay a poor riven body, which, for all I knew, might be that of the little maid’s father, silent, shapeless, and for ever at rest. “Let us go there, then, and wait,” she said, more placably and in more docile fashion than she had yet shown. So we crossed the short crisp heather, and I walked between her and that which lay off upon our right hand, so that she should not see it. But the dogs Ashie and Gray were almost too much for me. For they had gone straight to the body of the slain man, and Ashie, ill-conditioned brute, sat him down as a dog does when he bays the moon, and, stretching out his neck and head towards the sky, he gave vent to his feelings in a long howl of agony. Gray snuffed at the body, but contented herself with a sharp occasional snarl of angry protest. “What is that the dogs have found over there?” said the little maid, looking round me. “Some dead sheep or other; there are many of them about,” I answered, with shameless mendacity. “Have your Bennan sheep brown coats?” she asked, innocently enough. I looked and saw that the homespun of the man’s attire was plain to be seen. “My father has been here before me, and has cast his mantle over the sheep to keep the body from the sun and the flies.” For which lie the Lord will, I trust, pardon me, considering the necessity and that I was but a lad. At any rate the maid was satisfied, and we took our way to the northern edge of the Bennan top. CHAPTER IV. MY SISTER ANNA.