ung in his bonds, for he had no strength in his
limbs. Then the pressure on this throat braced him, and also quickened
his numb mind. The liveliest terror ran like quicksilver through his
veins.

He endured some moments of this anguish, till after many despairing
clutches at his wits he managed to attain a measure of self-control. He
certainly wasn't going to allow himself to become mad. Death was death
whatever form it took, and he had to face death as many better men had
done before him. He had often thought about it and wondered how he
should behave if the thing came to him. Respectably, he had hoped;
heroically, he had sworn in his moments of confidence. But he had
never for an instant dreamed of this cold, lonely, dreadful business.
Last Sunday, he remembered, he had basking in the afternoon sun in his
little garden and reading about the end of Fergus MacIvor in WAVERLEY
and thrilling to the romance of it; and Tibby had come out and summoned
him in to tea. Then he had rather wanted to be a Jacobite in the '45
and in peril of his neck, and now Providence had taken him most
terribly at his word.

A week ago---! He groaned at the remembrance of that sunny garden. In
seven days he had found a new world and tried a new life, and had come
now to the end of it. He did not want to die, less now than ever with
such wide horizons opening before him. But that was the worst of it, he
reflected, for to have a great life great hazards must be taken, and
there was always the risk of this sudden extinguisher.... Had he to
choose again, far better the smooth sheltered bypath than this accursed
romantic highway on to which he had blundered.... No, by Heaven, no!
Confound it, if he had to choose he would do it all again. Something
stiff and indomitable in his soul was bracing him to a manlier humour.
There was no one to see the figure strapped to the fir, but had there
been a witness he would have noted that at this stage Dickson shut his
teeth and that his troubled eyes looked very steadily before him.

His business, he felt, was to keep from thinking, for if he thought at
all there would be a flow of memories--of his wife, his home, his
books, his friends--to unman him. So he steeled himself to blankness,
like a sleepless man imagining white sheep in a gate.... He noted a
robin below the hazels, strutting impudently. And there was a tit on a
bracken frond, which made the thing sway like one of the see-saws he
used to