vention, it is the one
wanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if it
may seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with him
for the dressing of MacLachlan's wound was no other than our Dark Dame
of Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty's capacity, and not at my
chronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come back
from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her
experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had
failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the
sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident
the one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with her
frenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whose
fields slope on Aora's finest bend.

For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure and
certain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her hands
while yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions,
and clysters; at morning on the saints' days she would be in the woods,
or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbs
and roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret of
age. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy lay
bleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart,
the worst of all diseases.

While M'Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman's coming, MacLachlan
tossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on without
stoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leading
sooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever "the dear
child," the "_m'eudailgheal_" "the white treasure," "the orphan "; it
was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid
no great heed to this constant wail; but M'Iver pondered and studied,
repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.

"If that's not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on," he concluded at
last, "I'm mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does the
one we know who mothers it now, and you'll notice, by the way, he has
nothing to say of her."

"Neither he has," I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had no
need to call my attention to.

"Do you know, I'm on the verge of a most particular deep secret?" said
John, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no hee