echoed Barrie. "I think it's perfectly unbelievable how any
girl can ever marry a man who isn't a Highlander and has no right to the
kilt!"

There was one for Somerled and one against me; but it only got my blood
up. Many a girl says a certain thing, and does another when her time
comes.

"If I were rich," she went on, "I'd live in a castle in the Highlands,
and I'd have it _full_, simply _swarming_, with pipers, playing me awake
in the morning and to sleep at night."

"I should like you to see your own castle of Dunelin at Dhrum. There are
plenty of pipers there. I've kept them all on, meaning them to play for
me some day," said Somerled, who had just then forgotten, I think, the
existence of myself and Mrs. James, and failed to observe that in the
distance all Miss Barribel MacDonald's missing young men were
assembling, as if to the call of the blood--the soldier from Carlisle,
who had collected a friend, and the American contingent of four.

"My own castle?" Barrie repeated.

"You know what I mean. It would be yours if you'd been a boy. As you
aren't----"

"It's yours!" laughed she.

"Not by right of blood. Only by right of money."

"Well, that's the sovereign right," she insisted, pleased with her own
pun.

Then the victims of our miniature Circe arrived in the foreground, shook
hands, bandied jokes, and became the most prominent figures in the
picture. For the first time I was glad to see them, nor did I bear the
youths ill-will for separating me from our beneficent enchantress in the
stately church with historic banners. They had separated her from
Somerled as well.

After service was over, we stopped only for a look at the stones which
mark in the pavement the old Heart of Midlothian, and then hurried back
to the hotel, escaping the Americans, but clung to by Douglas and his
cousin, another Douglas, who hospitably bade us all to visit him at all
his houses. He mentioned several, dotted about in various parts of the
country; but when he heard that Miss MacDonald was retiring from the
party in a day or two, he ceased to press the general invitation.

There was news of Mrs. Bal at the Caledonian. A maid had arrived who
thought that her mistress would not follow until the evening: Somerled
asked Barrie, therefore--rather wistfully, I thought--if she would care
to go out again in the afternoon. "It will make the time pass for you,"
he added. I sympathized with him against my will. It was to be his last