The Dark Mile. D. K. Broster

on Ewen’s shoulder, and then went past him and, drawing the window-curtains aside, looked out. Yet he wondered what could possibly be Finlay MacPhair’s connection with the tragedy—no, he must have misunderstood Ewen; there could be none. And he would not reopen so painful a subject.

      “I hope we do not disturb Uncle Alexander by our talk,” observed Ewen, rousing himself. “Is not this room of yours next to his?”

      “My father grows a little hard of hearing,” said Ian in reply. He dropped the curtain. “And the wind blows to-night. Speaking of my father’s deafness, by the way, I think that was the reason why I overheard you telling him something about your brother-in-law, Hector Grant—that he had come into an inheritance; or was I mistaken?”

      “No, you were not mistaken,” answered his cousin, and rose suddenly to his towering height. “Hector has been left a small property in Glenmoriston by some remote kinsman of his father’s, and he will soon be coming over from his regiment in France to visit it. Indeed, Alison wonders whether he will not resign his commission and settle in Glenmoriston.”

      “Oh, indeed,” said Ian drily. “But Mr. Grant will find the existence of a Highland laird but a poor thing after his life as an officer in France. Would he not be better advised to think twice before taking such a plunge?”

      Ewen swung round on him. “I never knew that you disliked Hector!” he exclaimed in a tone of surprise.

      “My dear Ewen, I don’t. But I cannot think him, somehow, suited to the Highlands.”

      “He’s as Highland as yourself, laochain; his mother was a Macrae.”

      “Maybe. But a lifetime spent in France has given him . . . too much French polish for my taste.”

      “Is that your objection?” said Ewen, laughing. “I had not noticed the defect myself; and as to a ‘lifetime,’ why, he is only about two years older than you. He is younger than my wife.”

      Ian made a gesture to dismiss Mr. Hector Grant. “Talking of Lady Ardroy, is the daughter like you or like her, Ewen? Your boys, I think, favour you both, one apiece.”

      “You had better come with me when I return and see for yourself,” answered his cousin. “I shall insist upon Uncle Alexander sparing you for a night or two. You have not visited us, I think, since you gave Donald that claymore hilt which Keithie threw into the loch, two years ago last autumn. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I am going to bed!”

      On that announcement his host remorsefully snatched up a candle to light him to his room, excusing himself for having selfishly, as he declared, called him into his, by the fact that he saw him so rarely.

      But, coming back, Ian Stewart did not follow his kinsman’s example and go to bed. He sat down on the window-seat, where the curtain was already drawn aside, and gazed for a long time at the silver road which led across Loch Linnhe to the mountains beyond. The Celt in him had gone dreaming; dreaming as a girl is supposed to dream of the ideal lover. But his romance had never come to him, and soon it would be too late for it. He must mate, since it was his duty to beget children to come after him, without ever knowing that high rapture of which the poets sang, and the moonlight, and the flight of wild swans over the pool. There would be no Deirdre or white-breasted Bronwen for him, only a decorous young housewife, a MacLaren or a Maclean, whom he would respect and cherish, and to whom he would be faithful. In time, perhaps, would come affection too. Well, perhaps that was better in the end than passion, but youth was slipping away, and he had never known youth’s prerogative, to give, and hazard everything in the giving. His marriage would be as tepid an affair as that impassive moon now looking at him over the mountains of Ardgour.

      Yet under that same roof, up in her little turret room, Ian’s young sister Jacqueline was smiling in her sleep, having heard something that evening which had pleased her. For her sentiments about Lieutenant—now Captain—Hector Grant differed entirely from her brother’s. In her dreams she did not seek the ideal lover, for it seemed to her that she had already met him, here in her father’s house, more than two years ago. She had been but seventeen then. If, on his way to his recent inheritance in Glenmoriston, he should come this way again? . . . She was dreaming that he had.

      And away in northern France, where the same moon was silvering the steep-pitched roofs of Lille, a handsome young man in uniform was going home to his quarters, after a game of cards, with pockets somewhat lightened. But what did that matter? He was almost a man of substance now—no longer, at any rate, a mere landless Jacobite. In the deserted streets, whence all good burghers had long ago departed, and where his footfalls woke such echoes on the cobbles, he began to whistle a Scots air. And who knows whether, when at last he reached his couch, he was not visited by the image of a girl in far away Appin? But the moon could not be sure of this, for she sank to rest before he did.

      She missed, therefore, by the hour of her setting, the conclusion of a novel and most interesting experiment in cattle-lifting not far from Ewen Cameron’s home at Ardroy in Lochaber.

      CHAPTER II

       ON HIS VERY HEARTHSTONE

       Table of Contents

      June 17th.

      “Eh, Alison, my lass, she’s going to be a beauty!” declared Miss Margaret Cameron, indicating a red and puckered object in which only the eye of faith or of close kinship could discern any such promise. Both these requirements, however, were fulfilled by the keen gaze of Miss Cameron, the infant’s great-aunt, who had brought up Ewen Cameron himself from a child.

      “You really think so?” asked Alison Cameron as, propped up in bed, she stooped her pretty becapped head with a smile over the sleeping baby in the crook of her arm. “I am afraid that Donald and Keithie may not be of that opinion when they return to-morrow. It was to-morrow that Ewen said, was it not, Aunt Marget?”

      “To-morrow it was, my dear. Now, shall I open your window a wee, since ’tis such a fine afternoon?” Erect, silver-haired and comely, she went to the window for that purpose, and gave an exclamation. “Preserve us, there’s about half a score of gillies or what not down below there! Now, might they but wear the tartan again, one could tell whose they were.”

      She continued to look out, uttering various surmises as to the identity of the invaders, until bent old Marsali, who had the entrée, came into the bedchamber.

      “There’s a gentleman below asking for Mac ’ic Ailein, and he from home,” she announced in the Gaelic and unemotionally.

      “A gentleman? Who is it?” inquired Miss Cameron with interest.

      “By what he says, it will be MacPhair of Glenshian.”

      Alison uttered a little exclamation, and her arm tightened round Miss Cameron the younger.

      “Glenshian!” exclaimed the elder lady. “And what’s Glenshian wanting here?”

      “He’s wanting the laird on an affair of business,” replied the old woman. “Then he asked could he see Lady Ardroy.”

      “The idea!” exclaimed Miss Cameron. “I will come down, Marsali, and find out what he desires. Am I sufficiently à la mode, think you, Alison? This is the first time the present Glenshian has set foot in this house, and I must not disgrace its master.”

      Alison beckoned her to the bed. “Aunt Margaret,” she said in a rather troubled voice, “I do not know how much you know, but Ewen and Glenshian are . . . not good friends. I wonder what has brought him?”

      “Not good friends? Since when?—Aye, I have fancied something of the sort. Then ’tis as well that Ewen is away,” deduced Miss Cameron briskly. “Glenshian can’t but be polite to an old woman, and he a young man too.”

      “But you say he has brought a number of gillies with him!”

      “Isn’t he but nine months or so Chief, and likes to swagger