walking like a townswoman from the knees. But Saskia swung
from the hips like a free woman, and Dickson had much ado to keep up
with her. She seemed to delight in the bitter freshness of the dawn,
inhaling deep breaths of it, and humming fragments of a tune.

Guided by Thomas Yownie they took the road which Dickson and Heritage
had travelled the first evening, through the shrubberies on the north
side of the House and the side avenue beyond which the ground fell to
the Laver glen. On their right the House rose like a dark cloud, but
Dickson had lost his terror of it. There were three angry men inside
it, he remembered: long let them stay there. He marvelled at his mood,
and also rejoiced, for his worst fear had always been that he might
prove a coward. Now he was puzzled to think how he could ever be
frightened again, for his one object was to succeed, and in that
absorption fear seemed to him merely a waste of time. "It all comes of
treating the thing as a business proposition," he told himself.

But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was
intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity
which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. "I haven't been
doing badly for an old man," he reflected with glee. What, oh what had
become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a bailie
had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial
Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he
had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor's and certainly
were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange
house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had
wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an
eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in
tramping the world with a fairytale Princess. I blush to confess that
of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many
more in the same line. "Gosh, but I'm seeing life," was his
unregenerate conclusion.

Without sight or sound of a human being, they descended to the Laver,
climbed again by the cart track, and passed the deserted West Lodge and
inn to the village. It was almost full dawn when the three stood in
Mrs. Morran's kitchen.

"I've brought you two ladies, Auntie Phemie," said Dickson.

They made an odd group in that cheerful place, where the new-lit fire
was crackling in t