the Provost's was a little to the left and at right angles,
so that its occupants and ours were in a manner face to face.

Gordon would be into many deeps of doctrine no doubt while I was in the
deeper depths of speculation upon my lady's mind. I think I found no
great edification from the worship of those days--shame to tell it!--for
the psalms we chanted had inevitably some relevance to an earthly
affection, and my eyes were for ever roaming from the book or from the
preacher's sombre face.

They might rove far and long, but the end of each journey round that
dull interior was ever in the Provost's pew, and, as if by some hint of
the spirit, though Betty might be gazing steadfastly where she ought,
I knew that she knew I was looking on her. It needed but my glance to
bring a flush to her averted face. Was it the flush of annoyance or
of the conscious heart? I asked myself, and remembering her coldness
elsewhere, I was fain to think my interest was considered an
impertinence. And there I would be in a cold perspiration of sorry
apprehension.

CHAPTER VII.--CHILDREN OF THE MIST.

The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, "pay their
daughters' tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon." Then it was
that they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters to
help themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest and
best It would be a skurry of bare knees down pass and brae, a ring of
the robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill or
in the hollows among the ripe grass, a brisk change of shot and blow if
alarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane's lantern.

This Michaelmas my father put up a _buaile-mhart_, a square fold of
wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts
at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them
throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed
the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions
around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of
Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual
autumn's recreation. But a _buaile-mhart_ when shifted from time to time
in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made
the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our
glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night
about a fire within one of the spaces of