The scent of moss and fern and overhanging leaf was sweet.

So perfect a woodland bower was the place, so delicate did the lady seem to his imagination, that he wished he could tell his concern for her alarm and readiness to devote himself to her cause.

But when he saw her shrink from him, he could only stand awkwardly, tell her in a few clumsy words that he and the other man had changed places, he did not know how, and he had thought to take her to the farm.
"Your voice is very like his," she said, looking at him strangely.
But he now knew certainly, what for the last hour had seemed to him almost impossible, that in very truth the religious assembly was to take place that night; and the thought of it, and of the strange excitement with which others had gone before them on that same path took from Alec, and, he supposed, from the lady also, the power to give much consideration to their own strange encounter.

When he had told her of the time he had seen old Cameron at prayer in the lone wintry fields, and how far he had just walked to see him again in the strange conditions of to-night, they climbed on together..