How it was I cannot say, but The mystery of the house made me giddy at the head. Yet I was bound to push my searching further, so round with a swithering heart went Elrigmore to the very front door of the mansion of Dalness--open, as I have said, with the light gushing lemon-yellow on the lawn. I tapped softly, my heart this time even higher than my bosom, with a foot back ready to retreat if answer came. Then I rasped an alarm on the side of the yett with a noise that rang fiercely through the place and brought the sweat to my body, but there was even then no answer. So in I went, the soft soles of my brogues making no sound on the boards, but leaving the impress of my footsteps in a damp blot. Now, to me, brought up in a Highland farm-steading (for the house of Elrigmore is without great spaciousness or pretence), large and rambling castles and mansions ever seem eerie. I must in them be thinking, like any boy, of the whisperings of wraiths in their remote upper rooms; I feel strange airs come whipping up their long or crooked lobbies at night; the number of their doors are, to my Highland instinct, so many unnecessary entrances for enemies and things mischancy. But to wander over the house of Dalness, lit from tol-booth to garret with lowe--to see the fires, not green but at their prime with high-banked peat that as yet had not thrown an ash--to see so fine a supper waiting in a mansion utterly desolate and its doors open to the wilds, seemed a thing so magical that I felt like taking my feet from the place in a hurry of hurries and fleeing with my comrades from so unco a countryside. High and low I ranged in the interior. I had found a nut without a kernel, and at last I stood dumfoundered and afraid, struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through the interior. I might have been there fifteen minutes or half an hour when M’Iver, impatient at my delay or fearing some injury to my person, came in and joined me. He too was struck with amazement at the desertion of the house. He measured the candles, he scrutinised the fires, he went round the building out and in and he could but conclude that we must be close upon the gate when the house was abandoned. “But why abandon it?” I asked. “That’s the Skyeman’s puzzle; it would take seven men and seven years to answer it,” said he. “I can only say it’s very good of them (if there’s no ambuscade in it) to leave so fine an inn and so bonny a supper with a bush above the door and never a bar against entrance. We’ll just take advantage of what fortune has sent us.” “The sooner the better,” said I, standing up to a fire that delighted my body like a caress. “I have a trick of knowing when good fortune’s a dream, and i’ll be awake and find myself lying on hard heather before the bite’s at my mouth.”