maintained with their last breaths that it was the woman who had brought about the change in Isa’s situation, each knew in her secret heart that it was the man. As she stepped along the girl told herself that he must surely be somewhere in the neighbourhood. Why had he come to Pitairdrie kirk if he had no connection with Pitairdrie parish?
The parcel she carried contained some little presents her lover had given her – a silk handkerchief, some strings of beads, a pair of earrings.
She could not forgive him for his last words to her; her vanity smarted and she longed to repay him for them. There was something of her mother in her, for all her elegant looks and refined aspirations. The pair had agreed that the returning of the gifts by her own hand would be an effective means of showing how little the parting from Alec troubled her. If he should come to the door she would hand him the packet with a few scornful words, and if Auntie Thompson came, she would know how to crush her by her manners and appearance. She had never spoken to Auntie Thompson.
She turned into the little garden path. The tangle of nasturtiums by the kitchen window prevented her from seeing the two people who were observing her approach from the hearth at which they sat. She knocked at the door.
Words almost forsook her a moment later when it was opened by the stranger, the object of all her day-dreams and speculations. This time he was not dressed for Sunday. But he had lost little by the change.
She was absolutely bewildered. He made no offer to admit her; he did not even ask her business. She gathered her wits as quickly as she could and addressed him, smiling and gracious. Her heart was beating.
‘Does Mrs. Thompson live here?’ she inquired, snatching, by the unnecessary question, at the chance of conversation.
‘Yes.’
He had a strange accent.
‘Perhaps you will kindly give this to Mr. Soutar?’
She held out the little packet.
‘Thanks.’
He took it and shut the door in her face. The blood rushed to her cheeks. He had looked at her as though she were a puddle to be avoided in the road. There was nothing to do but to walk away with what dignity she could command.
Just as she went through the little gate an elderly woman passed. She was presumably a neighbour, for she had come from a house close by.
She overtook her in a few paces.
‘What is the name of the gentleman who lives there?’ she asked her, pointing back to the nasturtium-covered walls.
‘Alec Soutar,’ said the woman.
‘I don’t mean him,’ said Isa, whose wits were coming back. ‘I mean the gentleman I was speaking to.’
‘Have ye no heard? Yon man’s newly come frae Ameriky wi’ a fortune. He’s seekin’ a wife, they tell me,’ added the other, with a twinkle in her eye.
‘But who is he? What is his name?’
‘Dod, that’s just Mistress Thompson’s ither nephew, John MacQueen, that gaed awa’ when he was a sma’ laddie,’ said the woman.
OF THE birth and origin of Jessie-Mary no one in the parish knew anything definite. Those who passed up the unfrequented cart-road by her grandmother’s thatched hovel used to see the shock-headed child among the gooseberry bushes of the old woman’s garden, peering at them, like an animal, over the fence.
Whether she were really the granddaughter of the old beldame inside the mud walls no one knew, neither, for that matter, did anybody care. The hovel was the last remaining house of a little settlement which had disappeared from the side of the burn. Just where it stood, a shallow stream ran across the way and plunged into a wood in which Jessie-Mary had many a time feasted on the plentiful wild raspberries, and run, like a little squirrel, among the trees.
It was not until she was left alone in the world that much attention was paid to her existence, and then she presented herself to the parish as a problem; for her life was lived a full half-century before the all-powerful Board School arose to direct rustic parents and guardians, and she had received little education. She had grown into a sturdy girl of twenty, with brown hair which the sun had bleached to a dull yellow, twisted up at the back of her head and hanging heavily over her brows. She was a fierce-looking lass, with her hot grey eyes. The parish turned its mind to the question of how she might earn a living and was presently relieved when Mrs. Muirhead, who was looking for an able-bodied servant, hired her in that capacity. She was to have a somewhat meagre wage and her clothes, and was to help her mistress in house and yard. When the matter was settled she packed her few possessions into a bundle and sauntered up the green loaning which ran between the hovel and Mrs. Muirhead’s decent roof, marking where one fir-wood ended and another began.
Mrs. Muirhead was the widow of a joiner, and she inhabited a cottage standing just where the woods and the mouth of the loaning touched the high road that ran north to the hills. She was well to do, for a cottager, and her little yard, besides being stacked with planks which her son, Peter, sawed and planed as his father had done before him, contained a row of hen-coops and a sty enclosing a pig whose proportions waxed as autumn waned. When the laird trotted by, he cast a favourable eye on the place, which was as neat as it befitted the last house on a man’s property to be. When he had passed on and was trotting alongside the farther wood he was no longer on his own ground, for the green, whin-choked loaning was debatable land lying between him and his neighbour.
As Jessie-Mary, with her bundle, came through the whins and opened the gate, Peter Muirhead, who was in the yard, heard the latch click and looked up from his work. At sight of the yellow head by the holly bushes he laid down the spokeshave he was using and came round to the front. The girl was looking at him with eyes whose directness a youth of his type is liable to misunderstand. He began to smile.
‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben?’ said Jessie-Mary tentatively.
Peter did not answer, but approached, his smile taking meaning.
‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben the hoose?’ she inquired, more loudly.
It occurred to her that he might not be in his right senses, for the mile or two of debatable track which separated her old home from her future one might as well have been ten, for all she had seen of the world at the other end of it. She knew very well that Muirhead the joiner had lived where she now stood, and she had seen the old man, but the shambling figure before her was entirely strange. Once, at the edge of the wood, she had listened to the whirr of sawing in the vicinity of the road and had gathered that the work went on, though Muirhead himself had departed.
‘She’s no here. Ye’ll just hae to put up wi’ me,’ said Peter jocosely. His mother was in the house, but he saw no reason for divulging the fact.
Jessie-Mary stood silent, scarcely knowing what to say.
‘Ye’re a fine lassie,’ observed Peter, still smiling alluringly.
She eyed him with distrust and her heavy brows lowered over her eyes; she began to walk towards the cottage. He sprang forward, as though to intercept her, and, as she knocked, he laid hold of her free hand. Mrs. Muirhead, from within, opened the door just in time
