d.

"Yes," said Glenfernie. "I saw you coming up the hill. Will you take
wine?"

"To your health, sir!"

"To your health!"

The lieutenant set down the glass and wiped his lips. "I have orders,
Mr. Jardine, which I may not disobey."

"Exactly so, Lieutenant."

"My duty, therefore, brings me in at your door--though of course I may
say that you and your household are hardly under suspicion of
harboring a proscribed rebel! A good Whig"--he bowed stiffly--"a
volunteer serving with the Duke in the late trouble, and, last but
not least, a personal enemy of the man we seek--"

"The catalogue is ample!" said Glenfernie. "But still, having your
orders to make no exception, you must search my house. It is at your
service. I will show you from room to room."

Lieutenant and soldiers and laird went through the place, high and low
and up and down. "Perfunctory!" said the lieutenant twice. "But we
must do as we are told!"

"Yes," said the laird. "This is my sister's garden. The small building
there is an old school-room."

They met Alice walking in the garden, in the winter sunshine.
Strickland, too, joined them here. Presentations over, the lieutenant
again repeated his story.

"Perfunctory, of course, here--perfunctory! The only trace that we
think we have we found in a glen near you. There is a cave there that
I understand he used to haunt. We found ashes, still warm, where had
been a fire. Pity is, the ground is so frozen no footstep shows!"

"You are making escape difficult," said Strickland.

"I flatter myself that we'll get him between here and the sea! I am
going presently," said the lieutenant, "to a place called White Farm.
But I am given to understand that there are good reasons--saving the
lady's presence--why he'll find no shelter there."

"Over yonder is the old keep," said Glenfernie. "When that is passed,
I think you will have seen everything."

They left Strickland and Alice and went to the keep. Their footsteps
and those of the soldiers behind them rang upon the stone stairs.

"Above is the room," said the laird of Glenfernie, "where as a boy I
used to play at alchemy. I built a furnace. I had an intention of
making lead into gold. I keep old treasures there still, and it is
still my dear old lair--though with a difference as I travel on,
though with a difference, Lieutenant, as we travel on!"

They came into the room, quiet, filled with books and old apparatus,
with a burning fire, with sunli