d
they be doing with a learned man and a gentleman? It is that silly Stair
who has set them on the track of my brothers. They will land at the
Burnfoot and catch them all at the Bothy of Blairmore, where they gather
to take their "four hours"--I must run and warn them--"

"Jean," said Patsy, "I can run two yards for your one. Lend me your
scarf and I shall go and warn the lads."

"You--the laird's daughter!"

"Yes, I," said Patsy, girding her waist with the red sash, and looking
to the criss-crossed ties of the bathing-sandals her uncle had given her
out of his store of foreign things. Her kilted skirt came but a little
way below her knee and her blouse of fine blue linen let her arms be
seen to the elbow. Patsy looked more Pictish than ever thus, with a
loose blown tassel of ink-black hair on her brow. Jean offered some
faint objections but did not persist. After all, it was the main thing
that the lads should be warned in time.

So Patsy, trim and slim as your forefinger with a string of red tied
about it, sped eastward over the hills to the Bothy of Blairmore.

CHAPTER III

THE BOTHY

Patsy had always been a wonderful runner. She could outpace her pony.
She could flee from Louis Raincy like the shadow of a wind-blown cloud
crossing a mountain-side, and on the sands, with none but Jean Garland
to see, Patsy could fleet it along the wet tide wash, sending the spray
about her as a swallow that skims a pond and flirts the surface with its
wings.

Old Diarmid mounted on the stile, balanced himself with his staff, and
looked. The dogs accompanying him cocked their ears in hopes of a chase,
but the next moment, their keen senses telling them that it was only
Patsy running over the heather, they settled down, marvelling that men
could be so strong with foot and hand and yet know so little.

There was half a mile to be run along the sands before turning up over
the hot glacier-planed stones of the moor. Diarmid Garland watched and
wondered. He had often seen Patsy giving his daughter Jean, of the
heavier and slower-moving blonde Scandinavian blood, half the distance
to Saythe Point and then passing her, as an arrow may miss and pass one
who flees. Now she moved like a leaf blown by the hurricane. Her white
feet in their sandals of yellow leather of Corinth hardly seemed to
touch the sand. Then Patsy turned up the crumbling cliffs at their
lowest point, mounting like a goat with an effortless ease till she