She never admitted to herself that she had come up the hill to look for Archie.
And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls.
For the steps of love in the young, and especially in girls, are instinctive and unconscious.
In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was consciously seeking her neighbourhood.

The afternoon had turned to ashes in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and drawn him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began to come on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by the moor path to Cauldstaneslap.

He had no hope to find her; he took the off chance without expectation of result and to relieve his uneasiness.
The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the slope and came into the hollow of the Deil's Hags, to see there, like an answer to his wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink kerchief sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in these desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead weaver.
Those things that still smacked of winter were all rusty about her, and those things that already relished of the spring had put forth the tender and lively colours of the season.

Even in the unchanging face of the death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering, the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green.

By an afterthought that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive face.