umn, with a sound of wintry breakers on the
shore, the tall woods copper-colour, the thickets dishevelled, and the
nuts, in the corries of Ardkinglas, the braes of Ardno, dropping upon
bracken burned to gold. Until he was out of the glen and into the open
land, the traveller could scarcely conceive that what by his chart was
no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he
found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and
elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders,
the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more
explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling
silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant
rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the
faubourgs that were at once his vexation and his joy, and from the eager
ride that had brought him through Normandy when its orchards were busy
from morning till night with cheerful peasants plucking fruit, his ear
had not grown accustomed to the still of the valleys, the terrific hush
of the mountains, in whose mist or sunshine he had ridden for two days.
The woods, with leaves that fell continually about him, seemed in some
swoon of nature, with no birds carolling on the boughs; the cloisters
were monastic in their silence. A season of most dolorous influences, a
land of sombre shadows and ravines, a day of sinister solitude; the sun
slid through scudding clouds, high over a world blown upon by salt airs
brisk and tonic, but man was wanting in those weary valleys, and the
heart of Victor Jean, Comte de Montaiglon, was almost sick for very
loneliness.

Thus it came as a relief to his ear, the removal of an oppression little
longer to be endured, when he heard behind him what were apparently the
voices of the odd-looking uncouth natives he had seen a quarter of an
hour ago lurking, silent but alert and peering, phantoms of old story
rather than humans, in the fir-wood near a defile made by a brawling
cataract. They had wakened no suspicions in his mind. It was true they
were savage-looking rogues in a ragged plaid-cloth of a dull device, and
they carried arms he had thought forbidden there by law. To a foreigner
fresh from gentle lands there might well be a menace in their ambuscade,
but he had known men of their race, if not of so savage an aspect, in
the retinues of the Scots exiles who hung about the side-doors of Saint
G