for she had liked my mother,
and I think she planned to put me in the way of the Provost's daughter
as often as she could.

When his lordship was in his study, our daffing was in Gaelic, for her
ladyship, though a Morton, and only learning the language, loved to have
it spoken about her. Her pleasure was to play the harp--a clarsach of
great beauty, with Iona carving on it--to the singing of her daughter
Jean, who knew all the songs of the mountains and sang them like the
bird. The town girls, too, sang, Betty a little shyly, but as daintily
as her neighbours, and we danced a reel or two to the playing of Paruig
Dall, the blind piper. Venison and wine were on the board, and whiter
bread than the town baxters afforded. It all comes back on me now--that
lofty hall, the skins of seal and otter and of stag upon the floor, the
flaring candles and the glint of glass and silver, the banners swinging
upon the walls over devices of pike, gun, and claymore--the same to be
used so soon!

The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its
front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast
from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town. Between it and
the river was the small garden consecrate to her ladyship's flowers, a
patch of level soil, cut in dice by paths whose tiny pebbles and broken
shells crunched beneath the foot at any other season than now when the
snow covered all.

John Splendid, who was of our party, in a lull of the entertainment was
looking out at the prospect from a window at the gable end of the
hall, for the moon sailed high above Strone, and the outside world was
beautiful in a cold and eerie fashion. Of a sudden he faced round and
beckoned to me with a hardly noticeable toss of the head.

I went over and stood beside him. He was bending a little to get the top
of Dunchuach in the field of his vision, and there was a puzzled look on
his face.

"Do you see any light up yonder?" he asked, and I followed his query
with a keen scrutiny of the summit, where the fort should be lying in
darkness and peace.

There was a twinkle of light that would have shown fuller if the
moonlight were less.

"I see a spark," I said, wondering a little at his interest in so small
an affair.

"That's a pity," said he, in a rueful key. "I was hoping it might be a
private vision of my own, and yet I might have known my dream last night
of a white rat meant something. If that's fl