“I have more regard for my life,” said the woman. “I’m ower much of the Lowlander to trust myself in a den with a mad Highlander—even if he’s my own man. Forbye” (here she smiled), “forbye, I’ve tried it already. I have been twice at Kincreggan in the early morning, and he kept me fifty yards off the walls with his gun. But I would not care to have that mentioned in the place; it’s perhaps as little to my credit as to his own. Oh, if I had him under this roof again for ten minutes, or could get a certain thing delivered in his hands—” She broke off, and looked into Macdonald’s face quickly as with an inspiration. “What is it?” asked the clerk. “A little packet,” she replied; “just a small packet you could carry in your hand.” “_Buidseachas_—I mean witchcraft?” said Macdonald, who had brought a good many superstitions from Moidart. “Well, well—in a way, a sort of witchcraft,” she admitted, with a smile. “It is part of a charm that wiles men from their wild ways.” “I don’t know but what I might risk taking it to him, then,” said Macdonald, and so it happened that that very evening he found himself challenged fifty yards from the wall of Kincreggan, with a pair of slippers wrapped carefully in paper in his hands—nothing more. “What have you there, Macdonald?” cried the master, girning over the neck of a musket at his clerk, who shook on the edge of the river at the narrowest part of the pass. “I do not know,” was the lad’s answer, for indeed his knowledge of what he carried was due to his own curiosity and not to any information he had got from the lady who sent him. “I do not know; I was sent with it by your wife, Mr Macaulay.” “Kincreggan, you mean,” corrected the factor, plainly determined on the old territorial honours. “Kincreggan.” “Drop it into the pool, then,” commanded the madman, snuggling closer to his weapon, and Macdonald did as he was told. “Now come in and I will speak to you,” said Macaulay, and so the clerk got into Kincreggan, and however his master coaxed or cozened him, he stayed there.