He looked long at me, frowning blackly out of the grimmest face I had ever fronted; and yet that countenance, inexorable as fate, belonged to a young man not four years past his majority. "Without dubiety you deserve death," he said at the last, "but because of your youth I give you one chance. Disclose to me the hiding-place of the Pretender and you shall come alive out of the valley of the shadow." A foretaste of the end clutched icily at my heart, but the price of the proffered safety was too great. Since I must die, I resolved that it should be with a good grace. "I do not know whom your Grace can mean by the Pretender." His heavy jaw set and his face grew cold and hard as steel. "You fool, do you think to bandy words with me? You will speak or by heaven you will die the death of a traitor." "I need not fear to follow where so many of my brave comrades have shown the way," I answered steadily. "Bah! You deal in heroics. Believe me, this is no time for theatricals. Out with it. When did you last see Charles Stuart?" "I can find no honourable answer to that question, sir." "Then your blood be on your own head, fool. You die to-morrow morning by the cord." "As God wills; perhaps to-morrow, perhaps not for fifty years." While I was being led out another prisoner passed in on his way to judgment. The man was Captain Roy Macdonald. "I'm wae to see you here, lad, and me the cause of it by sending you," he said, smiling sadly. "How came they to take you?" I asked. "I was surprised on the beach just after Murdoch left," he told me in the Gaelic so that the English troopers might not understand. "All should be well with the yellow haired laddie now that the warning has been given. Are you for Carlisle, Kenneth?" I shook my head. "No, my time is set for to-morrow. If they give you longer you'll find a way to send word to Aileen how it went with me, Donald?" He nodded, and we gripped hands in silence, our eyes meeting steadily. From his serene courage I gathered strength. They took me to a bothy in the village which had been set apart as a prison for me, and here, a picket of soldiers with loaded muskets surrounding the hut, they left me to myself. I had asked for paper and ink, but my request had been refused. In books I have read how men under such circumstance came quietly to philosophic and religious contemplation, looking at the issue with the far-seeing eyes of those who count death but an incident. But for me, I am neither philosopher nor saint. Connected thought I found impossible. My mind was alive with fleeting and chaotic fragmentary impulses. Memories connected with Cloe, Charles, Balmerino, and a hundred others occupied me. Trivial forgotten happenings flashed through my brain. All the different Aileens that I knew trooped past in procession. Gay and sad, wistful and merry, eager and reflective, in passion and in tender guise, I saw my love in all her moods; and melted always at the vision of her.