d the last few yards of the way
with me, and I gave him De Chenier's mace in the jaw."

"Sir?"

"I put him slightly out of countenance with the butt and trigger-guard
of my pistol. Again I must apologise, dear Baron, for so unceremonious
and ill-tempered an approach to your hospitality. You will confess it is
a sort of country the foibles of whose people one has to grow accustomed
to, and Bethune gave me no guidance for such an emergency as banditti on
the fringe of Argyll's notoriously humdrum Court."

"Odd!" repeated Doom. "Will you step this way?" He led Count Victor to
the window that commanded the coast, and their heads together filled the
narrow space as they looked out. It was a wondrous afternoon. The sun
swung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed to
the gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood and
heather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him,
the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land,
the abode of seraphim and the sun's eternal smile.

"God is good!" said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion.
"I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradise
with open doors." Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the
wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that
glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch
upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm.

"Ah!" he said airily, "there is civilisation in the land after all."

"Plenty of law at least," said the Baron. "Law of its kind--MacCailen
law. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-General
of the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pit
and gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but his
Grace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up his
dule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It's
a fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as the
saying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France,
that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,'
though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grand
country out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that tree
there and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'm
at my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat."