In Mercy's unawakened soul, echoed now and then a faint thrill of response to some of the things Alister said, and, oftener, to some of the verses he repeated; and she would look up at him when he was silent, with an unconscious seeking glance, as if dimly aware of a beneficent presence. Alister was drawn by the honest gaze of her yet undeveloped and homely countenance, with its child-look in process of sublimation, whence the woman would glance out and vanish again, leaving the child to give disappointing answers. There was something in it of the look a dog casts up out of his beautiful brown eyes into the mystery of his master's countenance. She was on the edge of coming awake; all was darkness about her, but something was pulling at her! She had never known before that a lady might be lovely in a ballad as well as in a beautiful gown! Finding himself so listened to, though the listener was little more than a child, the heart of the chief began to swell in his great bosom. Like a child he was pleased. The gray day about him grew sweet; its very grayness was sweet, and of a silvery sheen. When they arrived at the burn, and, easily enough from that side, he had handed them across, he was not quite so glad to turn from them as he had expected to be. "Are you going?" said Christina with genuine surprise, for she had not understood his intention. "The way is easy now," he answered. "I am sorry to leave you, but I have to join Ian, and the twilight will be flickering down before I reach the place." "And there will be no moon!" said Mercy: "how will you get home through the darkness?" "We do not mean to come home to-night." "Oh, then, you are going to friends!" "No; we shall be with each other--not a soul besides." "There can't surely be a hotel up there?" Alister laughed as he answered, "There are more ways than one of spending a night on the hills. If you look from a window--in that direction," he said, pointing, "the last thing before you go to bed, you will see that at least we shall not perish with cold." He sprang again over the burn, and with a wave of his bonnet, went, like Ian, straight up the hill. The girls stood for some time watching him climb as if he had been going up a flight of stairs, until he stood clear against the sky, when, with another wave of his bonnet, he too disappeared. Mercy did not forget to look from her window in the direction Alister had indicated. There was no room to mistake what he meant, for through the dark ran a great opening to the side of a hill, somewhere in the night, where glowed and flamed, reddening the air, a huge crescent of fire, slowly climbing, like a column of attack, up toward the invisible crest.