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Had he been less hopeless he would have wondered why I did not reply immediately. I was looking covertly at the mudhouse, of which we were now within a few yards. Babbie's face had gone from the window, and. the door remained shut. That she could hear every word we uttered now, I could not doubt. But she was hiding from the man for whom her soul longed. She was sacrificing herself for him.
"My sister!" said the Soudanese boy, with a regal air, when they stood at the mudhouse door. And some instinct, as he was young and foolish, made the Englishman drag off both goggles and solar topee for a moment, and so Merla looked up and saw him with the sun bright on his light Saxon hair and friendly blue eyes.
"You're a pack o' liars," roared Rob, desperately, "and if you say again that ony wandering hussy has haud o' the minister, I'll let you see whether I can loup at throats." "But what makes you look for Mr. Dishart here?" he demanded, with an uneasy look at the light in the mudhouse. "Go hame," replied the precentor, "and deliver up the machine you stole, and leave this Session to do its duty.
When we were within a hundred yards of the mudhouse, I knew that there was no Babbie in sight. We halved the distance and then I saw her at the open window. Gavin's eyes were on the ground, but she saw him. I held my breath, fearing that she would run out to him. "You have never seen her since that night?" Gavin asked me, without hope in his voice.
Gavin rose weariedly, and walked through the mudhouse looking at her. "This is the end of it all," he said harshly, coming to a standstill. "I loved you, Babbie." "No," she answered, shaking her head. "You never knew me until now, and so it was not me you loved. I know what you thought I was, and I will try to be it now."
I can fancy his mind made up to watch the mudhouse until Gavin and the gypsy separated, and then pounce upon her. I daresay his whole plot could be condensed into a sentence, "If she's got rid o' this nicht, we may cheat the Session yet," But this is mere surmise. All I know is that he waited near Nanny's house, and by and by heard another trap coming up Windyghoul.
Down in the Auld Licht kirk that forenoon Gavin preached a sermon in praise of Woman, and up in the mudhouse in Windyghoul Babbie sat alone. But it was the Sabbath day to her: the first Sabbath in her life. Her discovery had frozen her mind for a time, so that she could only stare at it with eyes that would not shut; but that had been in the night.
"I hear it, Listen!" "That's the wind in Windyghoul," Sanders answered, looking at me queerly. "Come awa into the house." Hardly had I crossed the threshold of the mudhouse when such a sickness came over me that I could not have looked up, though Nanny's voice had suddenly changed to Margaret's.
"If I could only know that nothing evil had befallen her!" Babbie heard him and could not restrain a heartbreaking sob. "What was that?" he said, starting. A moment I waited, to let her show herself if she chose. But the mudhouse was silent again. "It was some boy in the wood," I answered. "Good-bye," he said, trying to smile.
Remembering that the mudhouse was near, she groped her way to it, meaning to pass the night there; but at the gate she turned away hastily, hearing from the door the voice of a man she did not know to be Nanny's brother. She wandered recklessly a short distance, until the rain began to threaten again, and then, falling on her knees in the broom, she prayed to God for guidance.
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