Any man, not an inbred and inborn villain, would have respected her at that moment. I put her hand on my arm and led her away gently past the ruined chapel, and down the slope of the hill.
"This lonely place is frightening you," I said. "Let us walk a little, and you will soon be yourself again."
She smiled through her tears like a child.
"Yes," she said, eagerly. "But not that way." I had accidentally taken the direction which led away from the city; she begged me to turn toward the houses and the streets. We walked back toward Edinburgh. She eyed me, as we went on in the moonlight, with innocent, wondering looks. "What an unaccountable influence you have over me!" she exclaimed.
"Did you ever see me, did you ever hear my name, before we met that evening at the river?"
"Never."
"And I never heard your name, and never saw you before. Strange! very strange! Ah! I remember somebody--only an old woman, sir--who might once have explained it. Where shall I find the like of her now?"
She sighed bitterly. The lost friend or relative had evidently been dear to her. "A relation of yours?" I inquired--more to keep her talking than because I felt any interest in any member of her family but herself.
We were again on the brink of discovery. And again it was decreed that we were to advance no further.
"Don't ask me about my relations!" she broke out. "I daren't think of the dead and gone, in the trouble that is trying me now. If I speak of the old times at home, I shall only burst out crying again, and distress you. Talk of something else, sir--talk of something else."
The mystery of the apparition in the summer-house was not cleared up yet. I took my opportunity of approaching the subject.
"You spoke a little while since of dreaming of me," I began. "Tell me your dream."
"I hardly know whether it was a dream or whether it was something else," she answered. "I call it a dream for want of a better word."
"Did it happen at night?"
"No. In the daytime--in the afternoon."
"Late in the afternoon?"
"Yes--close on the evening."
My memory reverted to the doctor's story of the shipwrecked passenger, whose ghostly "double" had appeared in the vessel that was to rescue him, and who had himself seen that vessel in a dream.
"Do you remember the day of the month and the hour?" I asked.
She mentioned the day, and she mentioned the hour. It was the day when my mother and I had visited the waterfall. It was the hour when I had seen the apparition in the summer-house writing in my book!