Captain Steen met me on deck and greeted me heartily. "There’s a brisk wind from the sou’-east," said he, "which should speed us well;" and soon, amid creaking of cordage and flapping of sails, we dropped down the estuary and set our face sea-wards. There was something of a squall of rain which beat on us till we were fairly beyond the Dutch coast; but after that it drew down to the west, and when I awoke the next morn, the sky was blue and sunshiny, and the soft south wind whistled gaily in the rigging. Of my voyage home I do not purpose to tell at length. On it I met with none of the mishaps which I had encountered before, so the brandy was wholly needless. Indeed, I found the greatest pleasure in the journey; the motion of the ship gave me delight; and it was fine to watch the great, heaving deserts before and behind, when the sun beat on them at mid-day, or lay along them in lines of gold and crimson at the darkening. The captain I found a friendly, talkative man, and from him I had much news of the state of the land whither I was returning. Nor was it of such a sort as to elate me, for it seemed as if, in the short time I had been away, things had taken many steps to the devil. The truth of the matter, I fancy, was that when I left Tweeddale I was little more than a boy, with a boy’s interests, but that now I had grown to some measure of manhood and serious reflection. But my time during the days of our sailing was in the main taken up with thoughts of Marjory. The word I had got still rankled in my mind, and I puzzled my brain with a thousand guesses as to its purport. But as the hours passed this thought grew less vexatious, for was not I on my way home, to see my love once more, to help her in perplexity, and, by God’s help, to leave her side never again? So anxiety was changed by degrees to delight at the expectation of meeting her, and, as I leaned over the vessel’s edge and looked at the foam curling back from the prow, I had many pleasing images in my fancy. I would soon be in Tweeddale again, and have Scrape and Dollar Law and Caerdon before my eyes, and hear the sing-song of Tweed running through the meadows. I thought of golden afternoons in the woods of Dawyck, or the holms of Lyne, of how the yellow light used to make the pools glow, and the humming of bees was mingled with the cry of snipe and the song of linnet. As I walked the deck there were many pictures of like nature before me. I thought of the winter expeditions at Barns, when I went out in the early morning to the snow-clad hills with my gun, with Jean Morran’s dinner of cakes and beef tightly packed in my pocket; and how I was wont to come in at the evening, numb and frozen, with maybe a dozen white hares and duck over my shoulder, to the great fire-lit hall and supper. Every thought of home made it doubly dear to me. And more than all else, there was my lady awaiting me, looking for the sight of my horse’s head at the long avenue of Dawyck.