le to womanliness with a brute, though in a cause against men the
most bitter and sometimes cruel of opponents.

A rustle in the brake at last compelled him. "Allons!" said he
impatiently with himself, "I do no more than I should have done with me
in the like case," and he pulled the trigger.

Then having deliberately charged the weapon anew, he moved off in the
direction he had been taking when the attack was made.

It was still, he knew, some distance to the castle. Half an hour before
his rencontre with those broken gentry, now stealing in his rear with
the cunning and the bloodthirstiness of their once native wolves (and
always, remember, with the possibility of the blunderbuss for aught that
he could tell), he had, for the twentieth time since he left the port of
Dysart, taken out the rude itinerary, written in ludicrous Scoto-English
by Hugh Bethune, one time secretary to the Lord Marischal in exile, and
read:--

... and so on to the Water of Leven (the brewster-wife at the howff near
Loch Lomond mouth keeps a good glass of _aqua_) then by Luss (with an
eye on the Gregarach), there after a bittock to Glencroe and down upon
the House of Ardkinglas, a Hanoverian rat whom 'ware. Round the loch
head and three miles further the Castle o' the Baron. Give him my
devoirs and hopes to challenge him to a Bowl when Yon comes off which
God kens there seems no hurry.

By that showing the castle of Baron Lamond must be within half an hour's
walk of where he now moved without show of eagerness, yet quickly none
the less, from a danger the more alarming because the extent of it could
not be computed.

In a little the rough path he followed bent parallel with the sea. A
tide at the making licked ardently upon sand-spits strewn with ware,
and at the forelands, overhung by harsh and stunted seaside shrubs, the
breakers rose tumultuous. On the sea there was utter vacancy; only a
few screaming birds slanted above the wave, and the coast, curving far
before him, gave his eye no sign at first of the castle to which he had
got the route from M. Hugh Bethune.

Then his vision, that had been set for something more imposing, for the
towers and embrasures of a stately domicile, if not for a Chantilly, at
least for the equal of the paternal chateau in the Meuse valley, with
multitudinous chimneys and the incense of kind luxuriant hearths,
suave parks, gardens, and gravelled walks, contracted with dubiety and
amazement upon a dismal to