again in vain, and having ate part of our coilop, we set us down to wait
the dawn. The air, for mid-winter, was almost congenial; the snow
fell no longer; the north part of the sky was wondrous clear and even
jubilant with star.

CHAPTER XIV.--MY LADY AND THE CHILD.

I woke with a shiver at the hour before dawn, that strange hour when the
bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out
his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur,
when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning.
M'Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very
nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the
chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier's
drill on his lips, but without opening his eyes.

We were on the edge of a glade of the wood, at the watershed of a small
burn that tinkled among its ice along the ridge from Tombreck, dividing
close beside us, half of it going to Shira Glen and half to Aora. The
tall trees stood over us like sentinels, coated with snow in every
bough; a cool crisp air fanned me, with a hint in it, somehow, of a
smouldering wood-fire. And I heard close at hand the call of an owl, as
like the whimper of a child as ever howlet's vesper mocked. Then to my
other side, my plaid closer about me, and to my dreaming anew.

It was the same whimper waked me a second time, too prolonged to be an
owl's complaint, and I sat upright to listen. It was now the break of
day. A faint grey light brooded among the tree-tops.

"John! John!" I said in my companion's ear, shaking his shoulder.

He stood to his feet in a blink, wide awake, fumbling at his sword-belt
as a man at hurried wakings on foreign shores.

"What is it?" he asked, in a whisper.

I had no need to answer him, for anew the child's cry rose in the
wood--sharp, petulant, hungry. It came from a thick clump of undergrowth
to the left of our night's lodging, not sixty yards away, and in the
half-light of the morning had something of the eerie about it.

John Splendid crossed himself ere he had mind of his present creed, and
"God sain us!" he whispered; "have we here banshee or warlock!"

"I'll warrant we have no more than what we seek," said I, with a joyous
heart, putting my tartan about me more orderly, and running a hand
through my hair.

"I've heard of unco uncanny things assume a wean's cry in a wood," said
he, very dub