The boy, with a start, shook himself free from his dreams and woke, as was his habit, to full and immediate consciousness of his surroundings. This eve of his twelfth birthday was a crisis in his life, high time for one who had made up his mind to be a leader of men to turn his back on childish things. And Richard, true to that unconsciously dramatic instinct of imaginative childhood which inspires children in the little plays they make from common incidents of every-day life, set about his task dramatically enough. For years he had kept nightly tryst with a certain portrait in the gallery; an image which kept alive in him the only spark of tenderness that remained after long months of frozen silence and reserve. It was an unnatural tryst for a boy of twelve, but Richard’s life was all unnatural. And love, which craves so passionately for outlet, has sometimes to content itself with the inanimate, instead of what is living and responsive. We have our favourites, even among ancestors. It was a certain Margaret Cunningham, daughter of that Earl of Glencairn who, being of the Privy Council of James V, was taken prisoner by the English in the year 1542, at the battle of Solway, who had won Richard’s heart. Marrying a Farquharson, she died six months later, "whereat," tradition said, "she waxed exceedingly joyful, since her whole heart’s love had been given since childhood to her cousin of Kilmaurs, but her parents, being worldly, would not permit the marriage, since Farquharson of Glune had more land and a finer heritage." True to his sex, Richard had been vanquished by the most tender, the most lovable little face in the whole gallery. It was to this picture that he confided his dreams, his ambitions; it was to this one of all others that he found it so infinitely hard to say farewell. But say farewell he would, notwithstanding, for the hardening process had already begun in him. He had to make his way in life; and such a way could not be carried out at home. Beyond the park gates and the empty lodge lay a world from which he meant to wrest power to restore Glune to her former beauty. Tragic and broken, she was to him as a living woman, who needed his help and claimed it as her due. And the one way he could really help her was to go. He had packed a chosen few of his belongings; of money he had none. But he was strong on the bread of hardship. Dan would, of course, be his companion; no one else. Richard had guessed the secret of this life’s success. Unhampered by ties of kinship or love, alone, a man may hope to find the key of that secret cupboard in which the world conceals her few prizes.