The Lilac Sunbonnet | Page 5

it. This
process is easy. But he saw very well that he could not rise from the lee
of the whin bush without being in full view of this eminently practical
and absurdly attractive young woman. So he turned to his Hebrew
Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim contraction of determined brows which
recalled his father. A country girl was nothing to the hunter after
curious roots and the amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and
Pual.
"I WILL not be distracted!" Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot,
correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant particle
through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.
A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.
"Bless me," said Ralph, startled, "this is most discomposing!"
He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of the
water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac sunbonnet in her
hand. She wared it high above her head, then she paused a moment to
look right in his direction under her hand held level with her brows.
Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a couple of fingers into her
mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had only known it, was much
admired of all the young men in the parish, and whistled clear and loud,
so that the stone-chat fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter
deeper among the gorse. A most revolutionary young person this. He
regretted that the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.
Ralph was deeply shocked that a girl should whistle, and still more that
she should use two fingers to do it, for all the world like a shepherd on
the hill. He bethought him that not one of his cousins, Professor
Habakkuk Thriepneuk's daughters (who studied Chaldaeic with their
father), would ever have dreamed of doing that. He imagined their
horror at the thought, and a picture, compound of Jemima, Kezia, and
Kerenhappuch, rose before him.
Down the hill, out from beneath the dark green solid foliaged elder
bushes, there came a rush of dogs.

"Save us," said Ralph, who saw himself discovered, "the deil's in the
lassie; she'll have the dogs on me!"--an expression he had learned from
John Bairdison, his father's "man," [Footnote: Church officer and
minister's servant.] who in an unhallowed youth had followed the sea.
Then he would have reproved himself for the unlicensed exclamation
as savouring of the "minced oath," had he not been taken up with
watching the dogs. There were two of them. One was a large, rough
deerhound, clean cut about the muzzle, shaggy everywhere else, which
ran first, taking the hedges in his stride. The other was a small,
short-haired collie, which, with his ears laid back and an air of grim
determination not to be left behind, followed grimly after. The collie
went under the hedges, diving instinctively for the holes which the
hares had made as they went down to the water for their evening drink.
Both dogs crossed to windward of him, racing for their mistress. When
they reached the green level where the great tubs stood they leaped
upon her with short sharp barks of gladness. She fended them off again
with gracefully impatient hand; then bending low, she pointed to the
loch-side a quarter of a mile below, where a herd of half a dozen black
Galloway cows, necked with the red and white of the smaller Ayrshires,
could be seen pushing its way through the lush heavy grass of the water
meadow.
"Away by there! Fetch them, Roger!" she cried. "Haud at them--the
kye's in the meadow!"
The dogs darted away level. The cows continued their slow advance,
browsing as they went, but in a little while their dark fronts were turned
towards the dogs as after a momentary indecision they recognized an
enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through the meadow and
poured across the unfenced road up to the hill pasture which they had
left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless turned slow bovine thoughts to
the coolness of the meadow grass, and the pleasure of standing
ruminant knee-deep in the river, with wavy tail nicking the flies in the
shade.
For a little while Ralph Peden breathed freely again, but his satisfaction
was short-lived. One girl was discomposing enough, but here were two.

Moreover the new-comer, having arranged some blankets in a tub to
her satisfaction, calmly tucked up her skirts in a professional manner
and got bare-foot into the tub beside them. Then it dawned upon Ralph,
who was not very instructed on matters of household economy, that he
had chanced upon a Galloway blanket-washing; and that, like the
gentleman who spied upon Musidora's toilet, of whom he had read in
Mr. James Thomson's Seasons, he might possibly see more than