The day was bright and clear, and their road lay across the short turf of broad uplands overhanging the wide northern sea. They reached the little town at set of sun, and found the chief inn a somewhat rude but not comfortless hostelry. Here they dined upon liberal Scottish fare, and sat long after their meal smoking by the wide hearth, where sea-coal and odorous pine-logs made a glorious fire. Even his Uncle Dan’s talk could not distract the younger man’s thoughts from that one subject upon which he had of late pondered so deeply. Within seven miles lay the spot where his mother had lived and suffered, something less than a quarter of a century ago. All day he had been thinking of her. The wild scene on which he looked was the landscape over which her sad eyes had wandered wearily, looking for some faint star of hope where hope was none. The waves of this northern sea had sounded the monotonous chorus of her melancholy thoughts. “O mother!” he said to himself, “and of all your young day-dreams, your girlish sorrows, there were none which you dared speak of to the son you loved so dearly! Even this bitter penalty you had to pay--the penalty of a lifelong silence. For your grief there was no sympathy, for your memories no confidant.” He left the mountain-shanty quietly at daybreak next morning. Host and hostess were stirring, but Daniel was sleeping profoundly in his humble nest--a mere cupboard in the wall of the room where the travellers had dined. Eustace had occupied a similar cupboard, and was not sorry to exchange so stifling a couch for the fresh breath of the north wind blowing over the red mountains. The path from Killalochie to Halko’s Head traversed a wild and picturesque country, high above the sea. Eustace looked down from the mountain-road, across the edge of precipitous cliffs, upon a broad sweep of sand--the sands on which his nameless father had walked full of fear on the night of his mother’s disappearance. Before noon he entered the little village, if village it could be called, a straggling group of rude stone cottages, inhabited by fishermen, whose nets hung on the low granite walls, and lay on the stunted turf before the doors. Two or three cottages of a better class were to be seen on the outskirts of the little colony, but even these presented small attraction to the eye of the English traveller. This was Halko’s Head. Eustace questioned a rough fisher-boy before he could convince himself that he did indeed tread the scene of his mother’s sad experiences--of his father’s selfish perfidy. For artist or poet the place had ample charm, but for the ordinary pleasure-seeker it would have appeared as barren as it was remote. Wilder or less fertile landscape was not to be found in North Britain; and to this untravelled wanderer the rough fishermen and brawny fisherwives seemed as strange as the inhabitants of Central Africa.