His mother and nurse shunned the gallery, believing it to be haunted—so much the better! Time after time, generally at dead of night, but sometimes even in the day, Richard himself had fancied he heard the stir and rustle of a silken skirt close beside him, and saw the flash of some dead soldier’s dirk. Whereupon, the moment being critical, a cold draught from some open door would generally blow in upon him, keen and sharp like the wind in mountain heather, to announce some ill-timed interruption of his nurse. Afterwards—a shrill scolding and imprisonment in a room from whose window he would immediately get out. Richard had no compunction as to flight when it was thus forced upon him, but by the time he returned the dream unfortunately, like many a later dream, would have had time to break. "Do you think that is what dreams are made for, Dan—only to break?" he asked his collie sometimes. Whereupon Dan would look up with the profoundly wistful negation of one who, although dumb, is wiser than his master. Eight—nine—ten—eleven. The old clock on the stairs in the west wing clanged asthmatically, hesitating between the strokes as one who doubted its ability to make the final effort. It was out of repair and past use, like most of the furniture of Glune. But Richard loved it. In Prince Charlie’s days the worn clock-case had sheltered one of his forbears, a Farquharson who, while carrying despatches to the Prince, was tracked and discovered by the enemy. Richard loved to poke his fingers into breathing holes which had been hastily bored at the back of the case, while armed men were clamouring for admittance at the very gates of Glune. From the first, it was to the call of valour and endurance that the boy’s heart leapt. Hunting about in an old lumber-room he had once come upon a box of marvels—forgotten papers and documents which he looked at, and went back to, and wept salt tears over, time after time. Every relic in the house was dear to him. The torn plaid upon which Charlie Stuart’s bonny head had lain, in the days before that brave heart had turned to water, and innocence was drowned in a flood of despair and shame—the tattered fragment of silk, once a flag, which a Farquharson had died upholding, a century before; a sporran stained quite lately with the blood of his grandfather—and a host of like treasures, witnesses of what a man should do, and of what alone was worth attempting. Richard slept in a little attic near the tower, far from his mother’s and the nurse’s rooms. Bare as a monk’s cell, it was "all his own." He swept it out and tidied it for himself daily; no woman’s foot, so far as he knew, had ever trod the staircase which led to it since he was first moved there four years before. Eight—nine—ten—eleven—midnight at last.