ntrue I would
not believe him, and you, you I take to be rather a devil from hell.
Said Livingstone eight days? And two are passed. I was proposing to go
south for other ends, and now I shall not fail to be there before that
appointment. But it may be, Grimond, I shall have to kill you."

CHAPTER IV

THOU ALSO FALSE

Dundee was a man of many trials, and one on whom fortune seldom
smiled; but the most cruel days of his life were the ride from
Inverness by the Pass of Corryarrack to Blair Athole, and from Blair
Athole by Perth to Dundee. He learned then, as many men have done in
times of their distress, the horror of the night time and the
blessing of the light. Had his mind not been affected by the
universal treachery of the time, and the disappointments he had met on
every side, till it seemed that every man except himself was hunting
after his own interest, and no one, high or low, could be trusted, he
had from the beginning treated Grimond's story with contempt and
made it a subject of jest. He would no more have doubted Jean's
honor than that of his mother. He would have known that Grimond never
lied, and that he did not often drink, but he also would have been
sure that even if it was Jean who met Livingstone, that there was
some good explanation, and he never would have allowed his thoughts
to dwell upon the matter. If Jean had been told that Graham had been
seen with a lady of the Court at Whitehall, she would have scorned
to question him, and indeed she had often laughed at the snares
certain frail beauties of that day had laid for him in London. For
she knew him, and he also knew her. But he was sorely tried in
spirit and driven half crazy by the disloyalty of his friends, and it
is in those circumstances of morbid, unhealthy feeling that the seeds
of suspicion find a root and grow, as the microbes settle upon
susceptible and disordered organs of the body.

As it was, he was divided in his mind, and it was the alternation of
dark and bright moods which made his agony. Spring had only reached
the Highlands as he rode southwards, but its first touches had made
everything winsome and beautiful. While patches of snow lingered on
the higher hills, and glittered in the sunlight, the grass in the
hollows between the heather was putting on the first greenness of the
season, and the heather was sprouting bravely; the burns were
full-bodied with the melting snow from the higher levels and rushing
with a plea