nder, my
lady's woman Christie; and I observed the effect of secrecy even upon
quite innocent persons, that one after another showed in the chink of
the door a face as white as paper. We slipped out of the side postern
into a night of darkness, scarce broken by a star or two; so that at
first we groped and stumbled and fell among the bushes. A few hundred
yards up the wood-path Macconochie was waiting us with a great lantern;
so the rest of the way we went easy enough, but still in a kind of
guilty silence. A little beyond the abbey the path debouched on the main
road; and some quarter of a mile farther, at the place called Eagles,
where the moors begin, we saw the lights of the two carriages stand
shining by the wayside. Scarce a word or two was uttered at our parting,
and these regarded business: a silent grasping of hands, a turning of
faces aside, and the thing was over; the horses broke into a trot, the
lamplight sped like Will-o'-the-Wisp upon the broken moorland, it dipped
beyond Stony Brae; and there were Macconochie and I alone with our
lantern on the road. There was one thing more to wait for, and that was
the reappearance of the coach upon Cartmore. It seems they must have
pulled up upon the summit, looked back for a last time, and seen our
lantern not yet moved away from the place of separation. For a lamp was
taken from a carriage, and waved three times up and down by way of a
farewell. And then they were gone indeed, having looked their last on
the kind roof of Durrisdeer, their faces toward a barbarous country. I
never knew before the greatness of that vault of night in which we two
poor serving-men--the one old, and the one elderly--stood for the first
time deserted; I had never felt before my own dependency upon the
countenance of others. The sense of isolation burned in my bowels like a
fire. It seemed that we who remained at home were the true exiles, and
that Durrisdeer and Solwayside, and all that made my country native, its
air good to me, and its language welcome, had gone forth and was far
over the sea with my old masters.

The remainder of that night I paced to and fro on the smooth highway,
reflecting on the future and the past. My thoughts, which at first
dwelled tenderly on those who were just gone, took a more manly temper
as I considered what remained for me to do. Day came upon the inland
mountain-tops, and the fowls began to cry, and the smoke of homesteads
to arise in the brown bosom of