will laugh at seeing the butler come out as a keeper."

"You know quite well, Keith," said his cousin, "that Hamish is no more a
butler than he is captain of the _Umpire_ or clerk of the accounts.
Hamish is simply everybody and everything at Castle Dare. And if you
speak of Norman Ogilvie--well, I think it would be more like yourself,
Keith, to consult the feelings of an old man rather than the opinions of
a young one."

"You are always on the right side, Janet. Tell Hamish I am very sorry. I
meant him no disrespect. And he may call me at one in the morning if he
likes. He never looked on me but as a bit of his various machinery for
killing things."

"That is not fair of you, Keith. Old Hamish would give his right hand to
save you the scratch of a thorn."

She went off to cheer the old man, and he turned to his book. But it was
not to read it; it was only to stare at the outside of it in an absent
sort of way. The fact is, he had found in it the story of a young
aid-de-camp who was intrusted with a message to a distant part of the
field while a battle was going forward, and who in mere bravado rode
across a part of the ground open to the enemy's fire. He came back
laughing. He had been hit, he confessed, but he had escaped: and he
carelessly shook a drop or two of blood from a flesh wound on his hand.
Suddenly, however, he turned pale, wavered a little, and then fell
forward on his horse's neck, a corpse.

Macleod was thinking about this story rather gloomily. But at last he
got up with a more cheerful air, and seized his cap.

"And if it is my death-wound I have got," he was thinking to himself, as
he set out for the boat that was waiting for him at the shore, "I will
not cry out too soon."

CHAPTER XIV.

A FRIEND.

His death-wound! There was but little suggestion of any death-wound
about the manner or speech of this light-hearted and frank-spoken fellow
who now welcomed his old friend Ogilvie ashore. He swung the gun-case
into the cart as if it had been a bit of thread. He himself would carry
Ogilvie's top-coat over his arm.

"And why have you not come in your hunting tartan?" said he, observing
the very precise and correct shooting costume of the young man.

"Not likely," said Mr. Ogilvie, laughing. "I don't like walking through
clouds with bare knees, with a chance of sitting down on an adder or
two. And I'll tell you what it is, Macleod; if the morning is wet, I
will not go out stalking, if al