rand to Dalness at this hour? One of its
regular occupants would scarcely make such to-do about her summons."

"The quickest answer could be got by asking her," I said.

"And about a feint?" he said, musing. "Well, we can but test it."

We went down and reported to our companions, and Gordon was for opening
the door on the moment "A wanderer like ourselves," said he, "perhaps
a widow of our own making from Glencoe. In any case a woman, and out in
the storm."

We stood round the doors while M'Iver put back the bars and opened as
much as would give entry to one person at a time. There was a loud cry,
and in came the Dark Dame, a very spectacle of sorrow! Her torn garments
clung sodden to her skin, her hair hung stringy at her neck, the
elements had chilled and drowned the frenzied gleaming of her eyes. And
there she stood in the doorway among us, poor woman, poor wretch, with a
frame shaking to her tearless sobs!

"You have no time to lose," she said to our query, "a score of Glencoe
men are at my back. They fancy they'll have you here in the trap
this house's owner left you. Are you not the fools to be advantaging
yourselves of comforts you might be sure no fairy left for Campbells
in Dalness? You may have done poorly at Inverlochy--though I hear the
Lowlanders and not you were the poltroons--but blood is thicker than
water, and have we not the same hills beside our doors at home, and I
have run many miles to warn you that MacDonald is on his way." She told
her story with sense and straightness, her frenzy subdued by the day's
rigour. Our flight from her cries, she said, had left her a feeling
of lonely helplessness; she found, as she sped, her heart truer to the
tartan of her name than her anger had let her fancy, and so she followed
us round Loch Leven-head, and over the hills to Glencoe. At the blind
woman's house in the morning, where she passed readily enough for a
natural, she learned that the eldest son in the bed had set about word
of our presence before we were long out of his mother's door. The men we
had seen going down in the airt of Tynree were the lad's gathering, and
they would have lost us but for the beetle-browed rogue, who, guessing
our route through the hills to Dalness, had run before them, and,
unhampered by arms or years, had reached the house of Dalness a little
before we came out of our journey in swamp and corry. A sharp blade,
certes! he had seen that unless something brought us to pause a