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or no. And always with her would be her young kinswoman, both henchwoman and friend, and maybe two—three years her junior, a nut-brown lassie with a kind of cool quiet darkness about her, like the coolth of tree-shade on a hot summer’s day. In some ways she was like my lady; they were the same shape, and would have had both of them the same grace, but that while my lady Jean met life with a dancing step, theother carried herself always as though she was braced for something. I never knew what, I doubt she did herself; it was something in her, like the strangeness she had as though part of her came from another country… Mary, she was mostly called; Mistress Mary Ruthven, but I heard my lady call her Darklis between themselves. Darklis is a gipsy name, a Tinkler name, aye. There were tales of gipsy blood mingled with the Kennedys’ – or Kennedy blood with the gipsies’, way back…
    So then, wherever my lady Jean went, there also went Mistress Mary. I mind I envied her, having someone to follow.
    But I’m running ahead of myself. My lady was up at Auchans with her mother when I first came to Place of Paisley, and I’d been there two—three weeks when she returned.
    She came back in wild April weather; and that same night, as though she had been waiting for her mistress’s return, Linnet, her old mare, dropped a fine filly foal. We got the mare into the big loose-box at the doorward end of the stable, where we would have plenty of room to work; and a long hard night we had, all three of us, the mare herself and Willie Sempill and me. Willie had taken a good opinion of me, finding me better skilled with the horses than most of my kind, and showed it by unloading on to me all the extra work about the place, and keeping me out of the warm straw in the loft where the other lads were snoring, to help him get old Linnet through her foaling. But when the light beyond the open stable door was turning green with daybreak and the gold of the big horn lantern fading, all was safely over, and the foal, still damp from its birth, already staggering on to its long legs and thrust blindly around its mother for the warm milk.
    And I mind somewhere a lark leapt up into the sky, singing like the morning star.
    We gave the mare a warm bran mash with a dash of good ale in it; and then Willie went off to douse his head in the horse-trough and get a bite to eat, leaving me to clean up the loose-box and put down fresh straw, while the world woke and the other stable-hands came down yawning and scratching themselves from the loft.
    I had just about finished – working slow and quiet so as not to fret the mare – when I heard a lassie’s voice outside, talking to Willie Sempill. ‘Why did you not send me word last night, Willie? Ye know how much Linnet means to me.’
    ‘Aye, I ken that fine, my leddy,’ said Willie, in the tone of a patient man hard tried, ‘and ’twas for that reason I didna send. Where would ha’ been the use? Ye would but ha’ fretted all night, and that wouldna be helping the mare.’
    And next moment, with a sudden dazzle of April sun behind her, and rain sparkling on the shoulders of the dark green cloak that she had flung on crooked in the by-going, was my lady Jean, and behind her the nut-brown lassie that at that time I scarce noticed at all.
    Coming in out of the April dazzle, I do not think she saw me at first in the brown shadows of the loose-box; and indeed I would have slipped out, knowing that she and the mare were well acquainted and there would be no risk of old Linnet becoming scared and unchancy, as can happen to a mare with a new foal when strangers come too close; but my lady and her henchwoman, and Willie Sempill hovering behind, were all across the doorway, and I could not well push past them, so I bided where I was.
    She gave her first attention to the mare, fondling hermuzzle and crest, and speaking the small soft words of love and pride into her twitching ear, in the broadest of the