arked. And I almost loved her. Mrs. Muir made us a wedding cake,
which she insisted on our taking away, in a large tin box: and when we
left Hillard House, Heppie's nose was pinker than I ever saw it, which
is saying a good deal.

Aline West was married to Mr. George Vanneck the very day we started
from Carlisle for Dhrum. We saw an account of the wedding in the paper.
It was at Glasgow; and she was going to a lovely place called St.
Fillans for her honeymoon. Basil gave her away, and was to return
immediately after to Canada, "on business."

It is like a dream to be living in the vast, turreted gray castle of our
ancestors, looking out over an endless sea, and to be the mistress of
such a house--I, little Barrie MacDonald, the princess rescued from a
glass retort. But it is a true dream. Ian says that he won me by a kind
of fraud, as the first Somerled won his Pictish princess; because we
weren't really married by that game we played with the photograph people
at Gretna Green. Only, he made up his mind even then, that if the wrong
man ever got a hold upon me, he would use the episode to frighten him
away. How thankful I am that it happened! If it hadn't, perhaps I should
have missed my happiness: but Ian says no, he would have snatched me
from Basil somehow, if not in one way, then in another. Poor Basil, I
can afford to remember him with forgiveness, and even a kind of
tenderness now! I think he always hated himself in his heart for doing
what he did. But tragedy came so near for a few hours that sometimes, if
Ian is separated from me for a moment, we have to rush to find each
other, and say "It's true--after all!"

At Dunelin Castle there are all the things I used to wish for: MacDonald
tartan on the walls and floors of many rooms; and torn, faded MacDonald
banners hanging in the dimness high up on the stone walls of the great
dining-hall--where we never dine. Pipers pipe us away in the morning,
and the skirl of the pipes mingles with the crying of gulls and the boom
of the sea in a thrilling way. The old servants look as if they had
never been born and could never die. They are delightfully superstitious
and quaint, and not one of them would kill a spider. Neither would I,
for the matter of that! I suppose it's my MacDonald blood and my love of
Bruce. You ought to see the elaborate precautions that are taken to get
rid of a spider in Dunelin Castle without insulting or hurting its
feelings!

Ian always wears the