’Parents have to make sacrifices,’ she said. ’Yes, and children too. And better they should make them while they are young than all through the years after. I hope Williamina’s will be no wasted life.’ He did not know what further to say; he was dismayed, perplexed, downhearted, or something: if this was a lesson she had meant to read him, it had struck home. So he rose and took his leave; and she thanked him again for the hares; and he went out, and found Harry awaiting him on the doorstep. Moreover, as he went down to the little gate, he perceived that Meenie was coming back—she had been but to the inn with a message; and, obeying some curious kind of instinct, he turned to the left—pretending not to have seen her coming; and soon he was over the bridge, and wandering away up the lonely glen whose silence is broken only by the whispering rush of Mudal Water. He wandered on and on through the desolate moorland, on this wild and blustering day, paying but little heed to the piercing wind or the driven sleet that smote his eyelids. And he was not so very sorrowful; his common sense had told him all this before; Rose Meenie, Love Meenie, was very well in secret fancies and rhymes and verses; but beyond that she was nothing to him. And what would Clebrig do, and Mudal Water, and all the wide, bleak country that had been brought up in the love of her, and was saturated with the charm of her presence, and seemed for ever listening in deathlike silence for the light music of her voice? There were plenty of verses running through his head on this wild day too; the hills and the clouds and the January sky were full of speech; and they were all of them to be bereft of her as well as he:— _Mudal, that comes from the lonely loch,_ _Down through the moorland russet and brown,_ _Know you the news that we have for you?—_ _Meenie’s away to Glasgow town._ _See Ben Clebrig, his giant front_ _Hidden and dark with a sudden frown;_ _What is the light of the valley to him,_ _Since Meenie’s away to Glasgow town?_ _Empty the valley, empty the world,_ _The sun may arise and the sun go down;_ _But what to do with the lonely hours,_ _Since Meenie’s away to Glasgow town?_ _Call her back, Clebrig! Mudal, call._ _Ere all of the young spring time be flown;_ _Birds, trees, and blossoms—you that she loved—_ _O summon her back from Glasgow town!_ ’_Call her back, Clebrig! Mudal, call!_’ he repeated to himself as he marched along the moorland road; for what would they do without some one to guard, and some one to watch for, and some one to listen for, in the first awakening of the dawn? Glasgow—the great and grimy city—that would be a strange sort of guardian, in the young Spring days that were coming, for this fair Sutherland flower. And yet might not some appeal be made even there—some summons of attention, as it were?