"Home, dog!" I gasped, and I threw him from me sprawling on the sod. He fell, in his weariness, in an awkward and helpless mass; the knife, still in his hand, pierced him on the shoulder, and thus the injury I could not give him by my will was given him by Providence. Over on his back he turned with a plash of blood oozing at his shirt, and he grasped with clawing fingers to stanch it, yet never relinquishing his look of bitter anger at me. With cries, with tears, with names of affection, the gillie ran to his master, who I saw was not very seriously injured.

M'Iver helped me on with my coat.

"You're far too soft, man!" he said. "You would have let him go scathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a pretty style of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded against a man more your equal."

"You'll never see it paraded by me," I answered, sorrowfully. "Here's my last duello, if I live a thousand years." And I went up and looked at my fallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung upon the young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitter every passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, the valley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If our butcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light of day, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven. The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servant stanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M'Iver, the old man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with the heart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a brooding silence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by men of peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts—over it shone of a sudden the new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell to weeping in my hands!

This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company than had the accident to MacLachlan. M'Iver stood dumfounded, to behold a cavalier of fortune's tears, and MacLachlan's face, for all his pain, gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over the shoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.

"Are you vexed?" said he, with short breaths.

"And that bitterly!" I answered.

"Oh, there is nothing to grieve on," said he, mistaking me most lamentably. "I'll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but my knife, if you'll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at you in a ruddy mist of the senses."

"I seek no other chance," I said; "our feuds are over: you were egged on by a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal."

His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M'Iver a silent man because he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to a cothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sent for a skilly woman.

In life, as often as in the stories of man's invention, it is the one wanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if it may seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with him for the dressing of MacLachlan's wound was no other than our Dark Dame of Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty's capacity, and not at my chronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come back from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident the one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with her frenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whose fields slope on Aora's finest bend.

For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure and certain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her hands while yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions, and clysters; at morning on the saints' days she would be in the woods, or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbs and roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret of age. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy lay bleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart, the worst of all diseases.

While M'Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman's coming, MacLachlan tossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on without stoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leading sooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever "the dear child," the "m'eudailgheal" "the white treasure," "the orphan "; it was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid no great heed to this constant wail; but M'Iver pondered and studied, repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.

"If that's not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on," he concluded at last, "I'm mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does the one we know who mothers it now, and you'll notice, by the way, he has nothing to say of her."

"Neither he has," I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had no need to call my attention to.

"Do you know, I'm on the verge of a most particular deep secret?" said John, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no heed to him.

The skilly dame came in with her clouts and washes. She dressed the lad's wound and drugged him to a more cooling slumber, and he was to be left in bed till the next day.

"What's all his cry about the child?" asked M'Iver, indifferently, as we stood at the door before leaving. "Is it only a fancy on his brain, or do you know the one he speaks of?"

She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows a secret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching to hear. "Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind," she admitted; "and I daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel the baby and the last to dress its mother—blessing with her!"

M'I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face. "I might well guess that," he said; "you have the best name in the countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I suppose," he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had found her vanity—"I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?"

"That's the very one," she said with a start; "but who told you?"

"Tuts!" said he, slyly, "the thing's well enough known about the Castle, and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think a secret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?"

"You're the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it," confessed the Dame Dubh. "MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman's confidence, and I've seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home, pretending more than a cousin's regard for the Provost's daughter so that he might share in the bairn's fondling. He did it so well, too, that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in her eyes."

I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the very last quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my rapture at the idea of MacLachlan's being no suitor of the girl go too far till I confirmed this new intelligence.

"Perhaps," I said in a little to the woman, "the two of them fondling the bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of its fatherhood."

"Chief!" she cried; "the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than I have, if an old woman's eyes that once were clear enough for such things still show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her how things stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has an eye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?" she added, laughing slyly to my friend.

A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan, bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.

Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; again its lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, white in the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig's house. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of the tenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeable exercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the first of the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and a rounded cheek upon a hand like milk.



CHAPTER XXXIV.—LOVE IN THE WOODS.

Young Lachie did not bide long on our side of the water: a day or two and he was away back to his people, but not before he and I, in a way, patched up once more a friendship that had never been otherwise than distant, and was destined so to remain till the end, when he married my aunt, Nannie Ruadh of the Boshang Gate, whose money we had been led to look for as a help to our fallen fortunes. She might, for age, have been his mother, and she was more than a mother to the child he brought to her from Carlunnan without so much as by your leave, the day after they took up house together. "That's my son," said he, "young Lachie." She looked at the sturdy little fellow beating with a knife upon the bark of an ashen sapling he was fashioning into a whistle, and there was no denying the resemblance. The accident was common enough in those days. "Who is the mother?" was all she said, with her plump hand on the little fellow's head. "She was So-and-so," answered her husband, looking into the fire; "we were very young, and I've paid the penalty by my rueing it ever since."

Nannie Ruadh took the child to her heart that never knew the glamour of her own, and he grew up, as I could tell in a more interesting tale than this, to be a great and good soldier, who won battles for his country. So it will be seen that the Dame Dubh's story to us in the cot by Aora had not travelled very far when it had not in six years reached the good woman of Boshang Gate, who knew everybody's affairs between the two stones of the parish. M'Iver and I shared the secret with MacLachlan and the nurse of his dead lover; it went no farther, and it was all the more wonderful that John should keep his thumb on it, considering its relevancy to a blunder that made him seem a scoundrel in the eyes of Mistress Betty. Once I proposed to him that through her father she might have the true state of affairs revealed to her.

"Let her be," he answered, "let her be. She'll learn the truth some day, no doubt." And then, as by a second thought, "The farther off the better, perhaps," a saying full of mystery.

The Dark Dame, as I say, gave me the cure for a sore heart. Her news, so cunningly squeezed from her by John Splendid, relieved me at once of the dread that MacLachlan, by his opportunities of wooing, had made himself secure in her affections, and that those rambles by the river to Carlunnan had been by the tryst of lovers. A wholesome new confidence came to my aid when the Provost, aging and declining day by day to the last stroke that came so soon after, hinted once that he knew no one he would sooner leave the fortunes of his daughter with than with myself. I mooted the subject to his wife too, in one wild valour of a sudden meeting, and even she, once so shy of the topic, seemed to look upon my suit with favour.

"I could not have a goodson more worthy than yourself," she was kind enough to say. "Once I thought Betty's favour was elsewhere, in an airt that scarcely pleased me, and———"

"But that's all over," I said, warmly, sure she thought of MacLachlan.

"I hope it is; I think it is," she said. "Once I had sharp eyes on my daughter, and her heart's inmost throb was plain to me, for you see, Colin, I have been young myself, long since, and I remember. A brave heart will win the brawest girl, and you have every wish of mine for your good fortune."

Then I played every art of the lover, emboldened the more since I knew she had no tie of engagement. Remembering her father's words in the harvest-field of Elrigmore, I wooed her, not in humility, but in the confidence that, in other quarters, ere she ever came on the scene, had given me liberty on the lips of any girl I met in a lane without more than a laughing protest Love, as I learned now, was not an outcome of the reason but will's mastership. Day by day I contrived to see my lady. I was cautious to be neither too hot nor too cold, and never but at my best in appearance and in conversation. All my shyness I thrust under my feet: there is one way to a woman's affections, and that is frankness to the uttermost. I thought no longer, ere I spoke, if this sentiment should make me ridiculous, or that sentiment too readily display my fondness, but spoke out as one in a mere gallantry.

At first she was half alarmed at the new mood I was in, shrinking from this, my open revelation, and yet, I could see, not unpleased altogether that she should be the cause of a change so much to my advantage. I began to find a welcome in her smile and voice when I called on the household of an afternoon or evening, on one pretext or another, myself ashamed sometimes at the very flimsiness of them. She would be knitting by the fire perhaps, and it pleased me greatly by some design of my conversation to make her turn at once her face from the flames whose rosiness concealed her flushing, and reveal her confusion to'the yellow candle-light. Oh! happy days. Oh! times so gracious, the spirit and the joy they held are sometimes with me still. We revived, I think, the glow of that meeting on the stair when I came home from Germanie, and the hours passed in swallow flights as we talked of summer days gone bye.

At last we had even got the length of walking together in an afternoon or evening in the wood behind the town that has been the haunt in courting days of generations of our young people: except for a little melancholy in my lady, these were perhaps life's happiest periods. The wind might be sounding and the old leaves flying in the wood, the air might chill and nip, but there was no bitterness for us in the season's chiding. To-day, an old man, with the follies of youth made plain and contemptible, I cannot but think those eves in the forest had something precious and magic for memory. There is no sorrow in them but that they are no more, and that the world to come may have no repetition. How the trees, the tall companions, communed together in their heights among the stars! how the burns tinkled in the grasses and the howlets mourned. And we, together, walked sedate and slowly in those evening alleys, surrounded by the scents the dews bring forth, shone upon by silver moon and stars.

To-day, in my eld, it amuses me still that for long I never kissed her. I had been too slow of making a trial, to venture it now without some effort of spirit; and time after time I had started on our stately round of the hunting-road with a resolution wrought up all the way from my looking-glass at Elrigmore, that this should be the night, if any, when I should take the liberty that surely our rambles, though actual word of love had not been spoken, gave me a title to. A title! I had kissed many a bigger girl before in a caprice at a hedge-gate. But this little one, so demurely walking by my side, with never so much as an arm on mine, her pale face like marble in the moonlight, her eyes, when turned on mine, like dancing points of fire—-Oh! the task defied me! The task I say—it was a duty, I'll swear now, in the experience of later years.

I kissed her first on the night before M'Iver set out on his travels anew, no more in the camp of Argile his severed chief, but as a Cavalier of the purchased sword.

It was a night of exceeding calm, with the moon, that I had seen as a corn-hook over my warfare with MacLachlan in Tarra-dubh, swollen to the full and gleaming upon the country till it shone as in the dawn of day. We walked back and forth on the hunting-road, for long in a silence broken by few words. My mind was in a storm. I felt that I was losing my friend, and that, by itself, was trouble; but I felt, likewise, a shame that the passion of love at my bosom robbed the deprivation of much of its sorrow.

"I shall kiss her to-night if she spurns me for ever," I said to myself over and over again, and anon I would marvel at my own daring; but the act was still to do. It was more than to do—it was to be led up to, and yet my lady kept every entrance to the project barred, with a cunning that yet astounds me.

We had talked of many things in our evening rambles in that wood, but never of M'Iver, whose name the girl shunned mention of for a cause I knew but could never set her right on. This night, his last in our midst, I ventured on his name. She said nothing for a little, and for a moment I thought, "Here's a dour, little, unforgiving heart!" Then, softly, said she, "I wish him well and a safe return from his travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid's promise—to be acted on or not as the mood happened."

"Yes," I said; "he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland and the town."

"I daresay," she answered; "he never lacked boldness."

My chance had come.

"No, indeed, he did not," said I; "and I wish I had some of it myself."

"What! for so common a display of it?" she asked, rallying, yet with some sobriety in her tone.

"Not a bit," I answered; "that—that—that I might act the part of a lover with some credit to myself, and kiss the one girl I know in that capacity."

"Would she let you?" she asked, removing herself by a finger-length from my side, yet not apparently enough to show she thought herself the one in question.

"That, madame, is what troubles me," I confessed in anguish, for her words had burst the bubble of my courage.

"Of course you cannot tell till you try," she said, demurely, looking straight before her, no smile on the corners of her lips, that somehow maddened by their look of pliancy.

"You know whom I mean," I said, pursuing my plea, whose rustic simplicity let no man mock at, remembering the gawky errors of his own experience.

"There's Bell, the minister's niece, and there's Kilblaan's daughter, and——"

"Oh, my dear! my dear!" I cried, stopping and putting my hand daringly on her shoulder. "You know it is not any of these; you must know I mean yourself. Here am I, a man travelled, no longer a youth, though still with the flush of it, no longer with a humility to let me doubt myself worthy of your best thoughts; I have let slip a score of chances on this same path, and even now I cannot muster up the spirit to brave your possible anger."

She laughed a very pleasant soothing laugh and released her shoulder. "At least you give me plenty of warning," she said.

"I am going to kiss you now," I said, with great firmness.

She walked a little faster, panting as I could hear, and I blamed myself that I had alarmed her.

"At least," I added, "I'll do it when we get to Bealloch-an-uarain well."

She hummed a snatch of Gaelic song we have upon that notable well, a song that is all an invitation to drink the waters while you are young and drink you may, and I suddenly ventured to embrace her with an arm. She drew up with stern lips and back from my embrace, and Elrigmore was again in torment.

"You are to blame yourself," I said, huskily; "you let me think I might. And now I see you are angry."

"Am I?" she said, smiling again. "I think you said the well, did you not!"

"And may I?" eagerly I asked, devouring her with my eyes.

"You may—at the well," she answered, and then she laughed softly.

Again my spirits bounded.

"But I was not thinking of going there to-night," she added, and the howlet in the bush beside me hooted at my ignominy.

I walked in a perspiration of vexation and alarm. It was plain that here was no desire for my caress, that the girl was but probing the depth of my presumption, and I gave up all thought of pushing my intention to performance. Our conversation turned to more common channels, and I had hoped my companion had lost the crude impression of my wooing as we passed the path that led from the hunting-road to the Bealloch-an-uarain.

"Oh!" she cried here, "I wished for some ivy; I thought to pluck it farther back, and your nonsense made me quite forget."

"Cannot we return for it?" I said, well enough pleased at the chance of prolonging our walk.

"No; it is too late," she answered abruptly. "Is there nowhere else here where we could get it?"

"I do not think so," I said, stupidly. Then I remembered that it grew in the richest profusion on the face of the grotto we call Bealloch-an-uarain. "Except at the well," I added.

"Of course it is so; now I remember," said she; "there is plenty of it there. Let us haste and get it" And she led the way up the path, I following with a heart that surged and beat.

When our countryside is changed, when the forest of Creag Dubh, where roam the deer, is levelled with the turf, and the foot of the passenger wears round the castle of Argile, I hope, I pray, that grotto on the brae will still lift up its face among the fern and ivy. Nowadays when the mood comes on me, and I must be the old man chafing against the decay of youth's spirit, and the recollection overpowers of other times and other faces than those so kent and tolerant about me, I put my plaid on my shoulders and walk to Bealloch-an-uarain well. My children's children must be with me elsewhere on my saunters; here I must walk alone. I am young again when looking on that magic fountain, still the same as when its murmur sounded in my lover's ears. Here are yet the stalwart trees, the tall companions, that nodded on our shy confessions; the ivy hangs in sheeny spray upon the wall. Time, that ranges, has here no freedom, but stands, shackled by links of love and memory to the rocks we sat on. I sit now there and muse, and beside me is a shadow that never ages, with a pale face averted, looking through leafless boughs at the glimpse of star and moon. I see the bosom heave; I see the eyes flash full, then soften half-shut on some inward vision. For I am never there at Bealloch-an-uarain, summer or spring, but the season, in my thought, is that of my wife's first kiss, and it is always a pleasant evening and the birds are calling in the dusk.

I plucked my lady's ivy with a cruel wrench, as one would pluck a sweet delusion from his heart, and her fingers were so warm and soft as I gave her the leaves! Then I turned to go.

"It is time we were home," I said, anxious now to be alone with my vexation.

"In a moment," she said, plucking more ivy for herself; and then she said, "Let us sit a little; I am wearied."

My courage came anew. "Fool!" I called myself. "You may never have the chance again." I sat down by her side, and talked no love but told a story.

It is a story we have in the sheilings among the hills, the tale of "The Sea Fairy of French Foreland"; but I changed it as I went on, and made the lover a soldier.

I made him wander, and wandering think of home and a girl beside the sea. I made him confront wild enemies and battle with storms, I set him tossing upon oceans and standing in the streets of leaguered towns, or at grey heartless mornings upon lonely plains with solitude around, and yet, in all, his heart was with the girl beside the sea.

She listened and flushed. My hero's dangers lit her eyes like lanthorns, my passions seemed to find an echo in her sighs.

Then I pitied my hero, the wandering soldier, so much alone, so eager, and unforgetting, till I felt the tears in my eyes as I imaged his hopeless longing.

She checked her sighs, she said my name in the softest whisper, laid her head upon my shoulder and wept. And then at last I met her quivering lips.



CHAPTER XXXV.—FAREWELL.

On the morrow, John Splendid came riding up the street on his way to the foreign wars. He had attired himself most sprucely; he rode a good horse, and he gave it every chance to show its quality. Old women cried to him from their windows and close-mouths. "Oh! laochain," they said, "yours be the luck of the seventh son!" He answered gaily, with the harmless flatteries that came so readily to his lips always, they seemed the very bosom's revelation. "Oh! women!" said he, "I'll be thinking of your handsome sons, and the happy days we spent together, and wishing myself soberly home with them when I am far away."

But not the old women alone waited on his going; shy girls courtesied or applauded at the corners. For them his horse caracoled on Stonefield's causeway, his shoulders straightened, and his bonnet rose. "There you are!" said he, "still the temptation and the despair of a decent bachelor's life. I'll marry every one of you that has not a man when I come home."

"And when may that be?" cried a little, bold, lair one, with a laughing look at him from under the blowing locks that escaped the snood on her hair.

"When may it be?" he repeated. "Say 'Come home, Barbreck,' in every one of your evening prayers, and heaven, for the sake of so sweet a face, may send me home the sooner with my fortune."

Master Gordon, passing, heard the speech. "Do your own praying, Barbreck———"

"John," said my hero. "John, this time, to you."

"John be it," said the cleric, smiling warmly. "I like you, truly, and I wish you well."

M'Iver stooped and took the proffered hand. "Master Gordon," he said, "I would sooner be liked and loved than only admired; that's, perhaps, the secret of my life."

It was not the fishing season, but the street thronged with fishers from Kenmore and Cairndhu and Kilcatrine and the bays of lower Cowal. Their tall figures jostled in the causeway, their white teeth gleamed in their friendliness, and they met this companion of numerous days and nights, this gentleman of good-humour and even temper, with cries as in a schoolboy's playground. They clustered round the horse and seized upon the trappings. Then John Splendid's play-acting came to its conclusion, as it was ever bound to do when his innermost man was touched. He forgot the carriage of his shoulders; indifferent to the disposition of his reins, he reached and wrung a hundred hands, crying back memory for memory, jest for jest, and always the hope for future meetings.

"O scamps! scamps!" said he, "fishing the silly prey of ditches when you might be with me upon the ocean and capturing the towns. I'll never drink a glass of Rhenish, but I'll mind of you and sorrow for your sour ales and bitter aqua!"

"Will it be long?" said they—true Gaels, ever anxious to know the lease of pleasure or of grief.

"Long or short," said he, with absent hands in his horse's mane, "will lie with Fate, and she, my lads, is a dour jade with a secret It'll be long if ye mind of me, and unco short if ye forget me till I return."

I went up and said farewell. I but shook his hand, and my words were few and simple. That took him, for he was always quick to sound the depth of silent feeling.

"Mo thruadh! mo thruadh! Colin," said he. "My grief! my grief! here are two brothers closer than by kin, and they have reached a gusset of life, and there must be separation. I have had many a jolt from my fairy relatives, but they have never been more wicked than now. I wish you were with me, and yet, ah! yet——. Would her ladyship, think ye, forget for a minute, and shake an old friend's hand, and say good-bye?"

I turned to Betty, who stood a little back with her father, and conveyed his wish. She came forward, dyed crimson to the neck, and stood by his horse's side. He slid off the saddle and shook her hand.

"It is very good of you," said he. "You have my heart's good wishes to the innermost chamber."

Then he turned to me, and while the fishermen stood back, he said, "I envied you twice, Colin—once when you had the foresight of your fortune on the side of Loch Loven, and now that it seems begun."

He took the saddle, waved his bonnet in farewell to all the company, then rode quickly up the street and round the castle walls.

It was a day for the open road, and, as we say, for putting the seven glens and the seven bens and the seven mountain moors below a young man's feet,—a day with invitation in the air and the promise of gifts around The mallards at morning had quacked in the Dhuloch pools, the otter scoured the burn of Maam, the air-goat bleated as he flew among the reeds, and the stag paused above his shed antlers on Torvil-side to hide them in the dead bracken.

M'Iver rode beside flowering saugh and alder tree through those old arches, now no more, those arches that were the outermost posterns where good-luck allowed farewells. He dare not once look round, and his closest friends dare not follow him, as he rode alone on the old road so many of our people have gone to their country's wars or to sporran battles.

A silence fell upon the community, and in upon it broke from the river-side the wail of a bagpipe played by the piper of Argile. It played a tune familiar in those parts upon occasions of parting and encouragement, a tune they call "Come back to the Glen."

Come back to the glen, to the glen, to the glen, And there shall the welcome be waiting for you. The deer and the heath-cock, the curd from the pen, The blaeberry fresh from the dew!

We saw the piper strut upon the gravelled walk beside the bridgegate, we saw Argile himself come out to meet the traveller.

"MacCailein! MacCailein! Ah the dear heart!" cried all our people, touched by this rare and genteel courtesy.

The Marquis and his clansman touched hands, lingered together a little, and the rider passed on his way with the piper's invitation the last sound in his ears. He rode past Kilmalieu of the tombs, with his bonnet off for all the dead that are so numerous there, so patient, waiting for the final trump. He rode past Boshang Gate, portal to my native glen of chanting birds and melodious waters and merry people. He rode past Gearron hamlet, where the folk waved farewells; then over the river before him was the bend that is ever the beginning of home-sickness for all that go abroad for fortune.

I turned to the girl beside me, and "Sweetheart," said I softly, "there's an elder brother lost. It is man's greed, I know; but rich though I am in this new heart of yours, I must be grudging the comrade gone."

"Gone!" said she, with scarcely a glance after the departing figure. "Better gone than here a perpetual sinner, deaf to the cry of justice and of nature."

"Good God!" I cried, "are you still in that delusion?" and I hinted at the truth.

She saw the story at a flash; she paled to the very lips, and turned and strained her vision after that figure slowly passing round the woody point; she relinquished no moment of her gaze till the path bent and hid John Splendid from her eager view.

THE END.