y business! What has that to do with
MacCailein's home-coming?"

"Very little indeed," I answered, recalling our bond; "but she cursed
his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old
soldier of Sweden."

"God ward all evil!" cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. "You'll be
glad to see your friend M'Iver back, I make no doubt."

"Oh! he's an old hand at war, madam; he'll come safe out of this by his
luck and skill, if he left the army behind him."

"I'm glad to hear it," said she, smiling.

"What!" I cried in raillery; "would you be grateful for so poor a
balance left of a noble army?"

And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the
dinner-table.

In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in
the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter,
the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the
Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time,
was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful
prospect--too briefly ours--that the country would settle anon to peace.

CHAPTER VIII.--THE BALE-FIRES ON THE BENS.

Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very
wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors
of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the
peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a
girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface
in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with
no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked
doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or
green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white
birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a
warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the
hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and
comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die
on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.

The very deer came down from the glens--_cabarfeidh_ stags, hinds, and
prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as
they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren
sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking
the shore and the tra