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And there was yan o' the lasses frae Castenand had set een on Angus, but she nivver let wit. As bonny a lass as there was in the country side, she was. They say beauty withoot bounty's but bauch, but she was good a' roond. She was greetly thought on.

The little cottage under Castenand; her old father playing his fiddle in the quiet of a summer evening; herself, a fresh young maiden, busied about him with a hundred tender cares; then a great sorrow and a dead waste of silence, all this appeared to belong to some earlier existence. And then the sun had seemed to rise on a fuller life that came later.

It was an open ingle with seats in the wall at each end, and the fire on the ground between them. A goat's head and the horns of an ox were the only ornaments of the chimney-breast, which was white-washed. On this night of 1660 the wind was loud and wild without. The snowstorm that had hung over the head of Castenand in the morning had come down the valley as the day wore on.

Then when life seemed to the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under Castenand, and put his hand in hers and looked calmly into her eyes. He told her that a girl could not live long an unfriended life like hers that she should not if she could; she could not if she would would she not come to him?

His hand was too nervous, his eye too uncertain, his breath too short for the constant risks of mountaineering; so he put away all further thought of adding store to store, and settled himself peaceably in his cottage under Castenand, content with the occasional pleasures afforded by his fiddle, an instrument upon which he had from his youth upward shown some skill.