"What, Margaret!" says he, and at that his aunt gave a gasp and began to laugh. "Ye perfect villain!" villain!" she cried, "is Maggie Duncanson a victim too? 'Faith it wouldna be a bad way for ye to get back your father's property to marry Maggie, but na, na, I couldna thole Drimdorran in the family;" and not a word more, good or bad, would she say about the topic, though her husband, now curious himself, made sly attempts at drawing her.

"Who were ye talkin' of?" he asked, when Eneas had gone out a little later, leaving them to their evening game of dambrod.

She bustled at the clearing of the table. "I'm no' gaun to tell ye that!" said she. "If women are to have a chance at a', they must be loyal to each other."

"I thought at first like Eneas," said he, "that ye were on the track o' Margaret."

"I

Annabel slyly smiled. think," said she, "I have spoiled her chance wi' him, if ever she had any; there's no' a quirk in Margaret's wee black heid I havena put him up to wi' my actin' o' the lovesick lass. To tell the truth to ye, that was the object o' my philanderin' wi' him. When he came back from Holland he was just a greenhorn; he couldna look at a short-gown dryin' on a line but aff his hat went to it, and his face went red. Any rubbish a woman liked to utter to him he would listen to wi'

reverence. I mind o' him wi' Bella Vicar-she had been talkin' some poetic nonsense to him, wi' yon dark, eerie, Hielan' eyes o' hers in the proper shape to hint at a soul as deep as a loch behind them, and when she was gone says he to me, 'There's something fascinatin' in that girl; I feel I could never quite understand her; wonderfu' depth o' character!' 'Heaven help me, is it Bella!' says I. 'Ye muckle calf! she's just as shallow as that ashet! Yon meltin' voice and swimmin' e'e were a' put on for your beguilement, and she didna understand the half o' what ye said about your Mr Milton, though she let on she did.' 'A certain kind o' mystery,' says he, and at that I fairly lost my patience wi' him. The mystery's all in your imagination,' I tell't him.

There's no' as much mystery in Bella as would keep ye gaun for a week wi' her.'"

"She's a fine, big, bouncin' girl, whatever of it," said the Bailie, putting out the dambrod

men.

I

"Just that! That's all you saw in her, you wicked monster; poor Æneas, on the ither hand, wi'a heid fu' o' Laitin poetry and nae experience, saw naething but the mystery. There's a mystery about a pig in a poke, and it's aye the innocents that's maist ta'en up wi't. saw my nephew had a lot to learn afore he could be trusted anywhere awa' frae men and aunties and the books o' that 'scritoire; I was just in mortal terror Maggie Duncanson would glamour him between her tasks; he was like a ripe plum ready

to drop into her pinny. That's the way I started makin' a parade o' tender interest in him. Losh! Alan, do you mind the fright he got at first when he thocht I maybe was in earnest!"

"I was put about to think it might be Margaret," said the Bailie. "Everybody kens that her father has an eye on Islay's son for her; that's the way he clapped her in wi' William for

the lessons, though Eneas was only hired by Islay for the lad."

"Margaret's a very clever lass wi' no' much sense, and she'll be better suited wi' Will Campbell," said Annabel. "But I doubt my practice wi' him hasna made him proof against attack in other quarters; a lass was sittin' in that very chair ye're on, twa oors ago, and she's the very kind to lead him on a halter made o' snaw."

Eneas had left his uncle's house with an intention to go up the glen again and make a search about the dovecote neighbourhood; it hovered in his mind that possibly some wastrel band of cairds was harbouring near Carlunan, and might have among them the intruder on the tower. Yet he had hardly reached the causeway when there flashed on him the popular repute of Ninian Campbell, who had, earlier in the day, been asking for him. That curious man, for whom the darkness of a strath, the sleep of towns, could hide no secret, might, in a sentence, dissipate the mystery!

Ninian was a Campbell only for expedience-his father was Macgregor of Dalvoulin in Balwhidder, who, when the Gregorach were shaken out of all their ancient holds like weevils from a seaman's biscuit, and their very name proscribed, had found protection with MacCailein and a home in Shira Glen. This clemency was not without design; Macgregor of Dalvoulin paid for his security

in wits. He wore the myrtle badge at Sheriffmuir, but also plied a craftier war, and longsustained, by night and day, and disconcerting, with Clan Campbell's enemies, most of whom were now his own. In the place of his adoption he was known as "Iain Beachdair"-John the Scout. He throve amazingly, and had a tack of some extent between Glen Shira and the braes of Cladich. Ninian, when his father died, took up the beachdair business, but dignified and cloaked a little by the sounding name of Messenger-at-Arms, though such a thing as a citation never soiled his hands. He was Macgregor to the bone -a gentleman with curious toleration for the broken lawless folk whose fortunes as a laddie he had shared. the sourry in the mist, the nightlong watches, skulkings in the heather; even in his burgess days he could not see a drove of cattle passing but his eye would lift. Many a time Lord Islay got him on the hill with the gun below his oxter, only

to shake a finger at him with "Ah, Ninian! ye'll never lose your taste for venison!" "Indeed," would Ninian say, no more abashed than if he had been stalking weasels, "here's a man that never yet put back to a haunch of that same nourishment! Good sport, Islay, for the day with both of us!"

Such a man as Ninian was worth his weight in gold as an instrument of governmental strategy. He knew the Highlands as he knew his pocket; below Loch Ness, at least, there was no pass or cave or clachan where he had not as a boy been wet and cold and weary, or sat about a fir-wood fire, or cried out the triple hoot of the cailleach-oidhche - the night-hag owl-to warn his folk of something dangerous stirring. As Messenger-at-Arms, with a badge he never showed, he was for ever on the road upon MacCailein's business, gathering hints and tracking rumours; the jealousies and pacts of clans, the private character of chiefs and chieftains, were better know to him than anybody; his was the skill that foiled them often in their movements.

It was his habit to be always out at night. "That is the time," he would say, "for people of my name and occupation. It is in the night that things worth while will aye be happening in the Highlands. There's nothing to be learned in daylight except that the girl is beautiful or otherwise, and people all mean well." The dark for him was full of meanings, intimations; things dim in daytime, tangled and con

fused, assumed a rational order then.

This curious faculty in Ninian it was that, coming to Æneas's recollection, sent him in a hurry to the house the beachdair occupied in town from harvest-end til spring. So keen he was to have his curiosity assuaged that he forgot, to start with, that no matter how he put the case there was a danger that Miss Margaret's escapade would be revealed: when this occurred to him, the purpose of his call on Ninian seemed scarcely wise. Nevertheless, he followed out his inclination, which, to tell the truth of it, was influenced in a measure, though he did not let his mind dwell on it, by the fact that Ninian had a daughter!

She was in the house alone when he was shown into it by a servant-lass-a piece of luck, as he first esteemed it, which he had not looked for, though it soon took on a different complexion. Her father, earlier in the evening, had been summoned out on business, and she expected his return at any moment.

Æneas waited willingly; there could not be a better chance to improve an acquaintance with the lady who, since he had left her at her door three weeks ago at two o'clock on a moonlight morning, had occupied his mind much more than he himself was well aware of, and all the more remarkably since in the interval she had been unusually invisible. There was a reason why the parting in the moonlight morning should engage his mind and

make him now uneasy as he took the seat she proffered; harmless practice with a merry aunt had had exactly that result his uncle looked for,Eneas some time ago had learned that women were not quite so terribly austere as he had thought at first, and that even a frolic interchange of gallantries had a good deal more of spice in it when exercised with others than with Annabel. It was not a quite unpractised hand who, as the convoy from a ball, for Janet Campbell, boldly boldly sought a Highland convoy's fee in the shape of a parting salutation in the moonlight, and got her open hand across his cheek!

The tingle of that buffet stayed with him for days; he felt it now as he sat in her parlour-room, and all his puzzling about the dovecote incident was swamped in a flood of new sensations.

It was the first time he had seen her in her own surroundings, which conferred upon her all the charm of novelty. She seemed a different being from the wide-hooped, tightly-bodiced partner he had sailed with down Macglashan's room, so simply dressed now, so demure and purpose-like, as if the house were meant to be her natural setting, that he took a new disgust at his own effrontery.

Not a word, of course, was said about that lamentable error, but her face, for usual pale, had a flush that spoke of some commotion, though she quickly took to her tambouring-girr, and stitching wildly,

dashed into conversation miles remote from the topic of the unlucky ball. He felt he was not forgiven, and he cursed anew his folly, seeing, as he fancied, half alarm and half reproof in her gray eyes, however level and unflinching, placed upon him.

He did not see her in detail so much as, in a fashion, take her presence in by other senses

the sound of her voice with its tang of Gaelic lending softness to her careful English sentences, all trimly finished even to the "g's" his lowland aunt could not be bothered with; the little scratchings. that her needle made upon her thimble; her breathing, which, in awkward pauses in their conference, seemed to indicate an agitation that he felt himself; a perfume, fugitive and pleasant, as of cool spring wells, that hung about her garments.

This hint of wells, and mornings cool and wholesome, all at once began to give to her a character which he had never thought before shared by human beings with the landscape he delighted in

was

surprise, variety, and stimulation; she was like a day upon the wild high moors in spring, and when she spoke it was the creamy gurgle of the April burns.

He took a look at her again, enchanted, when her eyes were

on

her occupation, hardly knowing what he talked of.

"I haven't seen you for so long!" he said with recklessness. "You have been busy? Do you never come out?"

"Oh yes!" she answered,

"every day. I was at your uncle's house this afternoon."

His face went crimson! The visitor his aunt had spoken of was not imaginary; Janet was the girl!

He felt abashed, remembering Annabel's interpretation of her caller's fidgeting, though fidgeting was none of Janet's traits to-night, however much they were his own. The calm was all with her, with him the gale of agitation, and now it swelled into a whirlwind blast in which his wits seemed blown away like perished leaves and swirling in the air. It is, indeed, a staggering hour when youth with no experience of these tempests of the breast is lifted from its feet by powers invisible with which it has been playing, thinking them no stronger than a woman's breath. That squall upon the instant levelled every dyke of self-possession, took him from himself, and gave him to the force that rules the world!

Like a man that grabs a hat blown down the road before him, he groped, one moment, wildly, for that splendid confidence he had but recently, no use! the storm had swallowed it! And not without some warnings, premonitions- he had shut his eyes to them deliberately, but now he knew the very razor was compelled by a dangerous interest in Janet Campbell, though he had been too timorous to admit it to himself!

Commingled with a great elation, such as always comes to healthy youth when thrown in battle with the elements, was mixed a sense of shame

that he should have the girl at an advantage through that revelation of his aunt. And still he was terrified to think that Annabel might be mistaken!

All this commotion filled some moments only, if one counted passion-hurricanes by time, which would be folly: he was much older when he spoke again without a quiver in his voice, to show the girl that she

was separated only by about the thickness of a waistcoat from the stress of weather.

"I did not know you had been calling," was all he said, and to himself it sounded very thin. "And oh!" he thought, "I had the daring to put arms about her!"

"Yes," she said, "I called," and suddenly grew very red again as she bent above her work.

His education had not quite cleared out the rustic lout in him; a silly boldness took the hold of him again, and "I'm vexed I was not in," said he.

"And I was almost glad you weren't," she rejoined, and showed confusion in her

manner.

"Why not?" he asked. "And I had almost kissed her!" he reflected with amazement to himself.

"For a private reason," she replied soberly. "It is of no consequence! I think I hear my father."

To Æneas, even, this relief was opportune; So many doubts and guesses seized him at the evidence of her perturbation that her father's