"I am going to ask a favour of you, Miss Stanley; and I hope you won’t refuse. I have brought a little present, if you will be so kind as to accept it: you may look on it as a souvenir of your visit to Heimra—for perhaps you remember the piece of lace you looked at——" She remembered very well; it was the exquisite Spanish mantilla to which Käthchen had drawn her attention. And it was not because this sumptuous piece of work was of great value that she hesitated about accepting it: would it not look like despoiling the dead woman? Instantly he appeared to divine her thought. "If my mother were alive," he said, simply, "she would ask you to take it—and from her, not from me." So there was no alternative: Mary silently accepted the gift. Nor was there any further word or hint on either side about that pious and secret pilgrimage to Heimra Island; but Donald Ross knew whose hand it was that had placed those flowers on the white grave. One evening, about this time, two men were dining together in the Station Hotel, Inverness, in a corner of the long coffee-room; and these two were Mr. David Purdie, solicitor and agent, and Mr. James Watson, who was on his way through to his sheep-farm of Craiglarig. But if they were dining together, their fare was very different; for while the fresh-complexioned, twinkling-eyed farmer was content with such simple vegetarian dishes as an ordinary hotel could devise at short notice, the Troich Bheag Dhearg was attacking an ample plateful of boiled beef and carrots, while a decanter of port stood near to his elbow. "Man, Watson," said the factor, with an expression of impatient disgust on his harsh, ill-tempered features, "I wonder to see ye swallowing that trash! It’s not food for human beings. Have ye been so long among sheep that ye must imitate their very eating?" "It’s live and let live, each in his own way," said the well-contented sheep-farmer; and then he added: "But tell me this, friend Purdie: if ye object to my eemitating a sheep, what kind o’ animal is’t you eemitate? For there’s only one kind o’ crayture I’ve heard o’ that would eat a dead cow—and that’s a hoodie crow." But this was an incidental remark: presently they returned to their main object, which was the condition of Lochgarra.