The Gowk Storm. Nancy Brysson Morrison

were turning away when I felt Emmy’s hand on my arm.

      ‘There,’ she whispered, ‘they’re coming back.’

      We stood close to the tree, at some distance from the tents, and watched. A silent, secretive procession was returning to the encampment. A rough-haired pony, drawing an empty cart, was followed by the gipsies in an uneven file. I knew that the cart’s last burden had been the boy’s dead body. They had buried him somewhere and his relations had followed him to his grave in strict precedence of next of kin. They would have buried his stick with him so that it could be of aid to him in the next world. Poor gipsy boy! We watched them move about the encampment, burning the tent in which he had lain and with it all his few belongings. Then we saw them gather their things together, harness the lean horse, and depart.

      ‘I recognised those gipsies,’ Emmy said as we walked back to the road, ‘they come round every year with the May-gobs’ (cold weather about the second week of May).

      ‘They won’t return,’ the dominie told her, ‘for gipsies never camp again where one of them has died.’

      We stood talking with him for some ten minutes before we went on our different ways. He was the only person I have ever met who was able to smile with his eyes while his lips remained grave; I think that was what gave him so kindly an expression and led people to confide in him. He looked smilingly from one to the other of us now, as though he were so glad he had met us, tracing resemblances and differences in our three faces.

      BOOK ONE. CHAPTER EIGHT

      ‘Do you like him?’ Julia asked anxiously when we had turned the corner.

      ‘He’s very nice,’ Emmy murmured indifferently; ‘he looks an ideal dominie from the children’s point of view.’

      ‘Papa says,’ Julia said, almost resentfully, ‘that he was one of the most brilliant scholars of his year at Glasgow College. He won everything he could for mathematics.’

      ‘I wonder what he’s doing buried up here then,’ observed Emmy; ‘that’s Highland, of course. Yes, he’s very nice, but a little like a moral come alive—no matter what you said or did to him, it would never alter his negative course. Isn’t it funny?—now I come to think of it, we have never seen him in church. Let’s go and visit some one to-night, I don’t feel I want to go home for hours and hours yet. I wish the Stratherns were back. Not that we could visit them to-night even if they were, but they do add an excitement.’

      ‘The only person we can visit is old Mrs Wands, and you know how difficult it is to get away from her.’