Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its surface like a looking-glass or shivers in icy winds. Round about the bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs from shore to shore.

To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings, and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant, her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about her head, her eyes brimming and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom generous—she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that hers was a soldier’s fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a tombstone—the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.

What she missed of the strident town was the clustering round of fellow creatures, the eternal drumming of neighbour hearts, the feet upon the pavement and the eager faces all around that were so full of interest they did not let her seek into the depths of her, where lay the old Highland sorrows that her richest notes so wondrously expressed. The tumult for herl Constant touch with the active, the gay! Solitude oppressed her like a looming disease. Sometimes, as in those mornings when she looked abroad from her window upon the Glen, she felt sick of her own company, terrified at the pathetic profound to which the landscape made her sink. Then she wept, and then she shook the mood from her angrily and flashed about the house of Maam like a sunbeam new-washed by the rain.

Her father used to marvel at those sudden whims of silence and of song. He would come in on some poor excuse from his stable or cunningly listen above his book and try to understand; but he, the man of action, the soldier, the child of undying ambitions, was far indeed from comprehension. Only he was sure of her affection. She would come and sit upon his knee, with arms around his neck, indulgent madly in a child’s caresses. Her uncle James, finding them thus sometimes, would start at an illusion, for it looked as if her mother was back again, and her father, long so youthful of aspect, seemed the sweetheart husband once more.

“Ah! you randy!” he would say to his niece, scowling upon her; “the sooner you get a man the better!”

“If there is one in the world half so handsome as my father—yes,” she would answer merrily, nestling more fondly in the General’s breast, till he rose and put her off with laughing confusion.

“Away! away!” he would cry in pretended annoyance. “You make my grey hairs ridiculous.”

“Where are they?” she would say, running her white fingers over his head and daintily refastening the ribbon of that antiquated queue that made him always look the chevalier. She treated him, in all, less like a father than a lover, exceedingly proud of him, untiring of his countless tales of campaign and court, uplifted marvellously with his ambitious dreams of State preferment. For General Turner was but passing the time in Maam till by favour promised a foreign office was found for him elsewhere.

“And when the office comes,” said he, “then I leave my girl. It is the one thing that sobers me.”

“Not here! not here!” she cried, alarm in eye and tone. So he found, for the first time, her impatience with the quiet of Maam. He was, for a little, dumb with regret that this should be her feeling.

“Where better, where safer, my dear?” he asked.

“Come up to the bow-window.” And he led her where she could see their native glen from end to end.

In the farm-towns the cots were displayed; smoke rose from their chimneys in the silent air, grey blue banners of peace. “Bide at home, my dear,” said he softly, “bide at home and rest. I thought you would have been glad to be back from towns among our own kindly people in the land your very heart-blood sprang from. Quiet, do you say? True, true,” and still he surveyed the valley himself with solemn eyes. “But there is content here, and every hearth there would make you welcome if it was only for your name, even if the world was against you.”

She saw the reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy. Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. “Is it not homely?” said he, dreading her reply. “I can bear it—with you,” she answered pitifully. “But if you go abroad, it would kill me. I must have something that is not here; I must have youth and life—and—life.”

“At your age I would not have given Maam and the glen about it for my share of Paradise.”—“But now?” said she.

He turned hastily from the window and nervously paced the room.

“No matter about me,” he answered in a little. “Ah! you’re your mother’s child. I wish—I wish I could leave you content here.” He felt at his chin with a nervous hand, muttered, looked on her askance, pitied himself that when he went wandering he must not have the consoling thought that she was safe and happy in her childhood’s home.

“I wish I had never sent you away,” he said. “You would have been more content to-day. But that’s the manner of the world, we must pay our way as we go, in inns and in knowledge.”

She ran up with tripping feet and kissed him rapturously.

“No lowland tricks!” he cried, pleased and yet ashamed at a display unusual in these parts. “Fancy if some one saw you!”

“Then let them look well again,” she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and dandled on his knee.

“I wish,” said he again, while she neatly tied the knot upon his queue, “I wish we had a husband for you, good or—indifferent, before I go.”

“Not indifferent, father,” she laughed. “Surely the best would not be too good for your daughter! As if I wanted a husband of any kind!”

“True, true,” he answered thoughtfully. “You are young yet. The best would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman’s well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no less. Can you guess him?”

“The Paymaster’s Boy,” said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.

Her father laughed.

“Pooh!” he exclaimed. “Is that all you have of our news here that you don’t know Gilian’s farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield? He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very humorous now when I think of it.”

“I told him he never would,” said Nan, with no note of triumph in the accuracy of her prediction. “I thought he could play-act the thing in his mind too well ever to be the thing itself.”

“It was Young Islay I meant,” said her father. “A smart fellow; he’s home on leave from his corps, and he promises to come some day this week to see the girl whose father has some reason to be grateful to him.”

She flushed all at once, overtaken by feelings she could not have described—feelings of gratitude for the old rescue, of curiosity, pleasure, and a sudden shyness. Following it came a sudden recollection of the old glamour that was about the ensign—such another, no doubt, as Young Islay—who had given her the first taste of gallantry as he passed with the troops in a day of sunshine. She looked out at the window to conceal her eyes, and behold! the glen was not so melancholy as it was a little ago. She wished she had put on another gown that afternoon, the rustling one of double tabinet that her Edinburgh friends considered too imposing for her years, but that she herself felt a singular complacence in no matter what her company might be.

“A smart fellow,” repeated her father musingly, flicking some dust from his shoes, unobserving of her abstraction. “I wish Sandy took a lesson or two from him in application.”

“Ah!” she cried, “you’re partial just because——”

And she hesitated.

—“Just because he saved my lassie’s life,” continued Turner, and seized by an uncommon impulse he put an arm round her and bent to kiss her not unwilling lips. He paused at the threshold, and drew back with a half-shamed laugh.

“Tuts!” said he. “You smit me with silly lowland customs. Fancy your old Highland daddie kissing you! If it had been the young gentleman we speak of——”

A loud rap came to the knocker of the front door, and Nan’s hands went flying to her hair in soft inquiries; back to her face came its colour.

It was Young Islay. He came into the room with two strides from the stair-head and a very genteel obeisance to the lady, a conceit of fashion altogether foreign to glens, but that sent her back in one dart of fancy to the parlour of Edinburgh, back to the warm town, back to places of gaiety, and youth, and enterprise, back to soft manners, the lip gossiping at the ear, shoes gliding upon waxen floors, music, dance, and mirth. Her heart throbbed as to a revelation, and she could have taken him in her arms for the sake of that brave life he indicated.

His eyes met hers whenever he entered, and he could not draw them away till hers, wavering before him, showed him he was daring. He turned and shook hands with the General, and muttered some commonplace, then back again he came to that pleasant face so like and yet so unlike the face he had known when a boy.

“You’ll hardly know each other,” said the father, amused at this common interest. “Isn’t she a most elderly person to be the daughter of so young and capable a man?”

Young Islay ranged his mind for a proper compliment, but for once he was dumb; in all the oft-repeated phrases of his gallant experiences there was no sentiment to do justice to a moment like this. “I am delighted to meet you again,” he said slowly, his mind confused with a sense of the inadequacy of the thing and the inexplicable feelings that crowded into him in the presence of a girl who, three years ago, would have no more disturbed him than would his sister. She was the first to recover from the awkwardness of the moment.

“I was just wishing I had on another gown,” she said more frankly than she felt, but bound to give utterance to the last clear thought in her mind. “I had an idea we might have callers.”

“You could have none that became you better,” said the lad boldly, feasting upon her charms of lip and eye. And now he was the soldier—free, bold, assured.

“What? In the way of visitors,” laughed her father, and she flushed again.

“I spoke of the gown,” said Young Islay (and he had not yet seen it, it might have been red or blue for all he could tell). “I spoke of the gown; if it depends on that for you to charm your company, you should wear no other.”

“A touch of the garrison, but honest enough to be said before the father!” thought General Turner.

Nan laughed. She courtesied with an affected manner taught in Edinburgh schools.

“Sir,” she said, “you are a soldier, and of course the gown at the moment in front of you is always the finest in the world. Don’t tell me it is not so,” she hastened to add, as he made to protest, “because I know my father and all the ways of his trade, and—and—and if you were not the soldier even in your pleasantries to ladies I would not think you the soldier at all.”

The General smiled and nudged the young fellow jocosely. “There,” said he, “did I not tell you she was a fiery one?”

“I hope you did not discuss me in that fashion,” said Nan, pausing with annoyance as she moved aside a little, all her pride leaping to her face.

“Your father will have his joke,” said Young Islay quickly. “He barely let me know you were here.”

The General smiled again in admiration of the young fellow’s astuteness, and Nan recovered.

They went to the parlour. Through the window came the songs of the reapers and the twitter of birds busy among the seeds at the barn-door. Roses swinging on the porch threw a perfume into the room. Young Islay felt, for the first time in his life, a sense of placid happiness. And when Nan sang later—a newer, wider world, more years, more thoughts, more profound depths in her song—he was captive.

To his aid he summoned all his confidence; he talked like a prince (if they talk head-up, valiantly, serene and possessing); he moved about the room studiously unconscious and manly; he sat with grace and showed his hand, and all the time he claimed the girl for his. “You are mine, you are mine!” he said to himself over and over again, and by the flush on her neck as she sat at the harpsichord she might be hearing, through some magic sense, his bold unspoken thought.

Evening crept, lights came, the father went out to give some orders at the barn; they were left alone. The instrument that might have been a heavenly harp at once lost its dignity and relapsed to a tinkling wire, for Nan was silent, and there crowded into Young Islay’s head all the passion of his people. He rose and strode across the room; he put an arm round her waist and raised her, all astounded, from the chair.

She turned round and tried to draw back, looking startled at his eyes that were wide with fire.

“What do you mean?” she gasped.

“Need you ask it?” he said in a new voice, raising an arm round her shoulder. His fingers unexpectedly touched her warm skin beneath the kerchief-souffle. The feeling ran to his heart, and struck him there like an earthquake. Down went his head, more firm his hold upon the lady’s waist; she might have been a flower to crush, but yet he must be rude and strong; he bent her back and kissed her. Her lips parted as if she would cry out against this outrage, and he felt her breath upon his cheek, an air, a perfume maddening. “Nan, Nan, you are mine, you are mine!” said he huskily, and he kissed her again.

Out in the fields, a corncrake raised its rasping vesper and a shepherd whistled on his dogs. The carts rumbled as they made for the sheds. The sound of the river far off in the shallows among the saugh-trees came on a little breeze, a murmur of the sad inevitable sea that ends all love and passion, the old Sea beating black about the world.

In the room was an utter silence. She had drawn back for a moment stupefied, checking in her pride even the breathing of her struggle. He stood bent at the head a little, contrite, his hat, that he had lifted, in his hand. And they gazed at each other—people who had found themselves in some action horribly rude and shameful.

“I think you must have made a mistake, or have been drinking,” she said at last, her breast now heaving stormily and her eyes ablaze with anger. “I am not the dairy-maid.”

“I could not help it,” he answered lamely. “You—you—you made me do it. I love you!” She drew back shocked.

He stepped forward again, manly, self-possessed again, and looked her hungrily in the eyes. “Do you hear that?” he said. “Do you hear that? I love you! I love you! There you look at me, and I’m inside like a fire. What am I to do? I am Highland; I am Long Islay’s grandson. I am a soldier. I am Highland, and if I want you I must have you.”

She drew softly towards the door as if to escape, but heard her father’s voice without, and it gave her assurance. A pallor had come upon her cheek, only her lips were bright as if his kiss had seared them.

“You are Highland, you are Highland, are you?” she said, restraining her sobs. “Then where is the gentleman? Do you fancy I have been growing up in Maam all the years you were away among canteens for you to come home and insult me when you wished?”

He did not quail before her indignation, but he drew back with respect in every movement.

“Madame,” he said, with a touch of the ballroom, “you may miscall me as you will; I deserve it all. I have been brutal; I have frightened you—that would not harm a hair of your head for a million pounds; I have disgraced the hospitality of your father’s house. I may have ruined myself in your eyes, and to-morrow I’ll writhe for it, but now—but now—I have but one plea: I love you! I’ll say it, though you struck me dumb for ever.”

She recovered a little, looked curiously at him, and “Is it not something of a liberty, even that?” she asked. “You bring the manners of the Inn to my father’s house.” The recollection of her helplessness in his grasp came to her again, and stained her face as it had been with wine.

He turned his hat in his hand, eyeing her dubiously but more calmly than before.

“There you have me,” he said, with a large and helpless gesture, “I am not worth two of your most trivial words. I am a common rude soldier that has not, as it were, seen you till a moment ago, and when I was at your—at your lips, I should have been at your shoes.”

She laughed disdainfully a little.

“Don’t do that,” said he, “you make me mad.” Again the tumult of his passion swept him down; he put a foot forward as if to approach her, but stopped short as by an immense inward effort. “Nan, Nan, Nan,” he cried so loudly that a more watchful father would have heard it outside. “Nan, Nan, Nan, I must say it if I die for it: I love you! I never felt—I do not know—I cannot tell what ails me, but you are mine!” Then all at once again his mood and accent changed. “Mine! What can I give? What can I offer? Here’s a poor ensign, and never a war with chances in it!”

He strode up and down the room, throwing his shadow, a feverish phantom, on the blind, and Nan looked at him as if he had been a man in a play. Here was her first lover with a vengeance! They might be all like that; this madness, perhaps, was the common folly. She remembered that to him she owed her life, and she was overtaken by pity.

“Let us say no more about it,” she said calmly. “You alarmed me very much, and I hope you will never do the like again. Let me think I myself was willing”—he started—“that it was some—some playful way of paying off the score I owe you.”

“What score?” said he, astonished. “You saved my life,” she answered, all resentment gone. “Did I?” said he. “It would be the last plea I would offer here and now. That was a boy’s work, or luck as it might be; this is a man before you. I am not wanting gratitude, but something far more ill to win. Look at me,” he went on; “I am Highland, I’m a soldier, I’m a man. You may put me to the door (my mother in heaven would not blame you), but still you’re mine.”

He was very handsome as he stood upon the floor resolute, something of the savage and the dandy, a man compelling. Nan felt the tremor of an admiration, though the insult was yet burning on her countenance.

“Here’s my father,” she said, quickly sitting at the harpsichord again, with her face away from it and the candle-light. Into the room stepped the General, never knowing he had come upon a storm. Their silence surprised him. He looked suspiciously at the lad, who still stood on the floor with his hat in his hand.

“You’re not going yet, Islay?” said he, and there was no answer.

“Have you two quarrelled?” he asked, again glancing at his daughter’s averted face.

Young Islay stammered his reply. “I have been a fool, General, that’s all,” said he. “I brought the manners of the Inn, as your daughter says, into your house, and—”

The father caught him by the sleeve and bent a most stern eye.

“Well, well?” he pushed.

“And—the rest, I think, should be between yourself and me,” said Young Islay, looking at Nan now with her back to them, and he and the father went out of the room.