ost non-existent. On the other side of the lake, four
miles up from the gates, on the edge of a ravine, down which rushed
a little stream called the Caller, was an inconvenient ricketty
cottage, built piecemeal at two or three different times, called
Drumcaller. From one room you went into another, and from that into
a third. To get from the sitting-room, which was called the parlour,
into another which was called the den, you had to pass through the
kitchen, or else to make communication by a covered passage out of
doors which seemed to hang over the margin of the ravine. Pine-trees
enveloped the place. Looking at the house from the outside any
one would declare it to be wet through. It certainly could not
with truth be described as a comfortable family residence. But you
might, perhaps, travel through all Scotland without finding a more
beautifully romantic spot in which to reside. From that passage,
which seemed to totter suspended over the rocks, whence the tumbling
rushing waters could always be heard like music close at hand, the
view down over the little twisting river was such as filled the mind
with a conviction of realised poetry. Behind the house across the
little garden there was a high rock where a little path had been
formed, from which could be seen the whole valley of the Caller and
the broad shining expanse of the lake beyond. Those who knew the
cottage of Drumcaller were apt to say that no man in Scotland had a
more picturesque abode, or one more inconvenient. Even bread had to
be carried up from Callerfoot, as was called the little village down
on the lake side, and other provisions, such even as meat, had to be
fetched twenty miles, from the town of Inverness.

A few days after the departure of Houston from Glenbogie two men
were seated with pipes in their mouths on the landing outside the
room called the den to which the passage from the parlour ran. Here
a square platform had been constructed capable of containing two
arm-chairs, and here the owner of the cottage was accustomed to sit,
when he was disposed, as he called it, to loaf away his time at
Drumcaller. This man was Colonel Jonathan Stubbs, and his companion
at the present moment was Isadore Hamel.

"I never knew them in Rome," said the Colonel. "I never even saw
Ayala there, though she was so much at my aunt's house. I was in
Sicily part of the time, and did not get back till they had all
quarrelled. I did know the nephew, who was a good-