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The wind whistled in his face as he rounded the Bennan and got his first glimpse of the Kells range, stretching far away over surge after surge of heather and bent, through which, here and there, the grey teeth of the granite shone.
The lilac sunbonnet waved a little heartless wave which dropped in the middle as if a string were broken. But the shining hair blew out, as a waft of wind from the Bennan fretted a moving patch across the loch. Ralph flung out his hand in one of the savage gestures men use when they turn bewildered and march away, leaving the best of their lives behind them.
And now this is the droll thing that came about. We had a day after the otters at the Bennan, a wet cold day, with little that was laughable in it, except that a man of the Macdonalds took an otter home over his shoulders, and the beast dead, as we thought; but coming in at his own door it gripped him by the back of his hip, and at the start he got he let a great cry to his wife in the Gaelic.
So here love and youth had come to part, between the heather that glowed on the Bennan Hill and the sapphire pavement of Loch Ken. For a long time Winsome and Ralph were silent the empty interior sadness, mixed of great fear and great hunger, beginning to grip them as they stood. Lives only just twined and unified were again to twain. Love lately knit was to be torn asunder.
Whaups swirled and wailed about the rugged side of Bennan above their heads. Across the loch there was a solitary farm so beautifully set that Ralph silently pointed it out to Winsome, who smiled and shook her head. "The Shirmers has just been let on a nineteen years' lease," she said, "eighteen to run." So practical was the answer, that Ralph laughed, and the strain of his sadness was broken.
So he journeyed onward, heedless of his going. To him came Jock Gordon, skipping like a wild goat down the Bennan side. "Hey, mon, d'ye want to drive intil Loch Ken? Ye wad mak' braw ged-bait. Haud up the hill, breest to the brae." Through his trouble Ralph heard and instinctively obeyed.
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