"Ay, it’s fine land, that," said he, grimly,—"for a wheen pesewepes!" And indeed the plovers were the only visible living things, jerking about in the air, dipping suddenly to the ground and swiftly rising again, with their curious squeaking call, and the soft velvet fluffing of their wings. However, all that was nothing. By and by they had left the Oykel strath, and had entered upon a far higher and bleaker region, the desolation of which appalled her. There was not even the solitary shepherd’s cottage they had seen down in the other valley; here was nothing but a wilderness of brown and ragged moorland, with deep black clefts of peat, and an occasional small tarn, without a bush along its shores, its waters driven a deep blue by the wind. Away in the west they could make out the spectral shapes of the Assynt mountains—Coul Beg, Coul More, and Suilven—remote and visionary through the universal haze of the heather-burning; but here, all around them, were these endless and featureless and melancholy undulations; and the silence was now unbroken even by the curious bleating of the plovers: once, and once only, they heard the hoarse and distant croak of a raven. "Käthchen," said Mary, in a sort of piteous dismay, as she looked abroad over those sombre solitudes, "you have been all along the Ross and Cromarty coast; is it like _that_?" "Plenty of it is worse," was the reply. "And—and—my place: is it like that?" "I have never been in to Lochgarra." "But—but if it is like that—what am I to do for my people?" "The best you can," said Käthchen, cheerfully. It seemed an interminable drive. And then, in the afternoon, a premature darkness came slowly over; the mountains in the north gradually receded out of sight; and heavy, steady rain began to fall. The two girls sat huddled underneath one umbrella, listening to the pattering footfalls of the horses and the grinding of the wheels on the road; and when they ventured to peep forth from their shelter they beheld but the same monotonous features in the landscape: masses of wet rock and dark russet heather, black swamps, low and bare hills, and now and again the grey glimmer of a stream or tarn. It was a cheerless outlook; continually changing, and yet ever the same; and hour after hour the rain came down wearily. There was hardly a word said between those two: whither had fled Mary Stanley’s dreams of a shining blue sea, a sunny coastline, and a happy peasantry busy in their fields and gardens, their white cottages radiant in the morning light? Käthchen, on the other hand, was inclined to laugh ruefully. "Isn’t it a good thing, Mary, that duty brought us here? If it had been pleasure, we should be calling ourselves awful fools." But quite of a sudden this hopeless resignation vanished, and a wild excitement took its place. "Miss Stanley," Mr. Purdie called to her, "we’ve come to the march." "The what?" "The march—the boundary of your estate."