And then she remembered and sought out the wedding ring she had bought that day: Ewan, will you put this on for me?

When she woke near morning in the little inn-room he was sleeping beside her, hallowed and clean and made whole again, light faint on the dark face turned to her shoulder; and in tenderness she lay and looked at him and thought Yes, that was fun, Oh Ewan, funny boy!

He woke at her movement—quickly, at once, and knew her, put his right arm under her head, and said sleepily did he tell her last night that Yes, she felt as well as looked like silk? Some funny grain in skin-texture, no doubt: he’d find out some time, unless he first ate her…. And he’d forgotten to kiss her as completely as he’d promised.

But when he’d done that and slept again, Ellen didn’t, holding him in a quiet compassion that he wouldn’t have understood and would never know; and that didn’t matter, she was his forever, in desire or hating, his till they ended or grew old and remembered, far off, the terror and wonder of those first moments that made you suddenly so frightened of God because there must be a God after all.

And Chris stood with gloved hands on the hot May railings and looked down at Duncairn where her marriage was waiting. What a reel of things in a short few months, what an antrin world that waited tomorrow!

Well, that had to be faced, and whatever else it would be (she thought, and smiled to her sulky self trigged out in the glass of the Windmill Steps) it wouldn’t be the tomorrow she expected now. No tomorrow ever was though you planned it with care, locked chance in the stable and buried the key.

Tomorrow.

Ake.

Ewan.

Ellen.

Ewan and his Ellen. What had happened with them? Nothing but the thing that had happened so often as any fool of a woman might know. And now that it had happened—what came next? And she thought Ah well, it’s no matter of mine, though her thoughts strayed a little even as she thought that, half in tenderness, half in anxiety, wondering what they’d said, what they’d done, what their compact was, not caring greatly they’d done ill by old standards though she hoped to God they’d at least been careful. And she minded their faces at breakfast that day and that look they’d exchanged while she sat and watched, Ellen’s open and lovely, unashamed, Ewan’s open as well, but the kind of smile that no lad ever yet kept for his lass. Grey granite and thistledown—how would they mix?

Oh, that unguessable tomorrow would tell!

FOUR

Zircon

THE HILL SLOPES were rustling with silence in the glimmer of the late June gloaming as Chris Ogilvie made her way up the track, litheness put by for a steady gait. On the bending slopes that climbed ahead to the last of the daylight far in the lift the turning grass was dried and sere, a June of drought and swithering heat, the heather bells hung shrunken and small, bees were grumbling going to their homes, great bumbling brutes Chris brushed from her skirts. Halfway up she stopped a minute and rested and looked down with untroubled eyes at the world below, sharp-set and clear each item of it in that brightness before the dark came down, mile on mile of coarse land and park rolling away to the distant horizons that tumbled south to her forty years in the distant Howe.