Six miles lay between their home and the tolbooth gates, and yet it was in pitch-black night they came to the confines of the burgh, for they dreaded the pitying eyes of men and women. And all the way the woman fondled something in her plaid. They saw, afar, and few, and melancholy, wan lights in the burgh lands, blurred by the weeping rain; and at this spectacle—which told them the world went on its ordinary way and thought of breakfast, while their lad sat counting the hours, and they were engaged with misery—the man put his hand on the woman’s shoulder with a grip of steel, and she gave the last sob that was ever heard from her. For ever after she was a woman made of stone. The horse, as if it shared their feeling, stopped on the highway, reared itself in terror of something unseen, and snapped its belly-band, and the cart stood still under heaving beeches whose windy branches filled the dark with noise and cried down the very waves which roared on Creag-nan-caoraich. The man jumped from the cart and fumbled with the harness, to find that further progress, wanting a girth, was not to be contemplated. “I will walk into the town,” he said, “and get a rope, if you sit here till I return. You will not mind my leaving you, Margaret?” “Mind!” she exclaimed with bitterness; “I have learned my lesson, and there is no more to mind.” But she fondled the thing concealed in her plaid, and her man walked quickly towards the wan lights of the tenements, leaving her all alone. For a moment only she heard his footsteps, the sound of them soon lost in the din of nature—the uproar of the forest trees, whose ponderous branches creaked; the wind, canorous, blowing between the mountains; the booming crepitation of the sea upon the rocks. And yet no sense of solitude depressed her, for her mind was occupied by one triumphant thought—that young John Clerk should at least be spared the horror and shame of a public execution. She had drawn, at first, the drenched plaid over her head to shield her and shut her in from the noise of tempest; but her hands in a little while were so busily engaged with her secret possession that the tartan screen at last rolled back on her shoulders, and she was aware of another sound than those of nature—the near, faint clang of chains. It was scarcely audible, but unmistakable—the beat of a loose end of iron links against wood, somewhere above her head, as she sat in the cart by the side of Creag-nan-caoraich. She stared up into the darkness and saw nothing, then stood to her feet and felt above her with trembling hand. Her fingers searched along a beam with a rope attached to it, whose meaning flooded to her brain with a gush that stunned; she touched a dead man’s feet! and the pitiless clouds that had swept all night across the heavens heaved for a moment from the face of the reeling moon, and she saw the wretch upon the gibbet!