“I suppose you’ll think me just a poor sap, Alan, but I can’t see where I come into that poem.”

“You prefer the reverend gentleman’s newspaper paragraph in verse about Myrtle Macdonald?”

“Oh, Alan!”

“What?”

“Why, you’ve said it yourself now. It was Mary Macdonald.”

“I meant Mary,” said the poet with a blush.

“And now you’re blushing.”

He blushed more richly, and scowled.

“You mean to say,” he began in tones which his embarrassment rendered ferocious, “you mean to say you can’t perceive the image in that poem?”

“I can see all sorts of images in it, but I can’t see my own.”

“The warm dark-brown water of life,” he urged, blushing again.

And then she too blushed, their blushes seeming more vivid because they were flaming against those sombre ladders of rain sloping from the leaden sky to the glen below.

“Say the poem again,” she murmured.

And this time he forgot the rigid principles imbibed from the gospel of Willie Yeats and allowed dramatic expression to enter into his recitation of Peaty Water:

“The heather,

The fading heather,

Is spread like the robe of a dead king

Upon my country,

Upon my dying country.

“I do not lament therefore, but laugh

When down through the stale dead purple

Dances the peaty water

Warm with the sharp sun of the high tops,

Prickt by the sun of the high tops,

The prattling peaty dark-brown water,

The warm dark-brown water of life.”

Myrtle sighed.’

“And you really wrote that about me?”

“I did.”

“It’s like a wonderful secret,” she sighed again. “Say it to Carrie. She’ll never guess it.”

Myrtle was right in presuming that her sister-in-law would not connect the poem Peaty Water with herself. She listened to it with a rapt expression in her greenish eyes that turned them to beryls.

“I think that’s a perfectly wonderful poem, Alan,” she said. “And the peaty water is S.B.A. of course.”

“S.B.A.?” Myrtle asked, a little sharply, for she had not heard Carrie call him Alan before. “Who’s S.B.A.?”

The other three looked at one another.

“It isn’t a person, honeybunch. It’s a …” Carrie stopped. “I think she ought to be told, don’t you?”

“Certainly,” Alan agreed, with a fervour that won him a flash from Myrtle’s dark-brown eyes.

“Och ay,” James Buchanan confirmed. “Miss Royde is fully entitled to be told.” The treasurer was thinking of more voluntary donations to the fighting fund.

“S.B.A. stands for Scottish Brotherhood of Action,” Carrie revealed. “It’s a secret society aiming at the revival of the national spirit of Scotland.”

“Does it want all that reviving?” Myrtle asked. “I haven’t been here quite a week yet, but I haven’t seen much sign of collapse.”