“My darling, it must be as you wish,” he said, and the rest was easy. Mr. Jerningham did not suffer the grass to grow under his feet. He was prompt to make all arrangements, and three days after the subject had been mooted, the travellers were on their northward way, speeding to Edinburgh by express. They were to spend three days in Edinburgh, then onward by easy stages, “doing” all the lions in their way, to the village and castle of Pendarvoch, which lay half in Perthshire, half in Aberdeenshire. CHAPTER XII. NORTHWARD. THE travellers had not left Greenlands two days when Eustace Thorburn arrived there. He had finished his work in Paris a month sooner than he had expected to do so, and had been glad to hurry home, in order to complete his arrangements with an eminent publishing firm, who, after considerable hesitation, had agreed to publish his poem without hazard of capital on his part, though not without foreboding of loss on theirs. M. de Bergerac had not forgotten to write to his secretary, announcing the Scottish expedition; but he had only written an hour before starting, and the letter and the secretary had crossed each other between Dover and Calais. Eustace came to Greenlands full of hopeful agitation. He had not forgotten the promise made his uncle. He had not forgotten that he was pledged to make a full confession to his kind patron, and to accept his banishment, if need were. His Parisian exile had only deferred the evil hour; it must come now, and speedily; and the decree would be spoken, and he and Helen must in all likelihood part for ever. But in the meantime he would see her once more, and it was for this unspeakable blessing he languished. For the last night of his sojourn in Paris sleep had been impossible. He could think only of the delight to which he was hastening--to see her once again! His love had grown day by day, hour by hour, during these long months of absence. As the train ploughed onwards through dusty flats, as the steamer danced across the sunlit waters, this one traveller counted the miles, and calculated the moments until he should near the beloved spot where his idol dwelt. He knew that his Uncle Dan would have been glad to see him, even for a brief exchange of greetings and shaking of hands; but he could not bring himself to spend the half-hour that it must have cost him to call in Great Ormond-street. Swift as a hack-cab could take him, he rushed from station to station, was so lucky as to catch a fast train for Windsor, and entered the shady avenues of Greenlands within fourteen hours of his departure from Paris. How fresh and verdant the spring landscape seemed to him!--the cowslips and bluebells, the hawthorn buds just beginning to whiten the old rugged trees, gummy chestnut husks scattering the ground, and from afar the rich odour of newly-opened lilacs.