Inverlochy, Inverlochy, Inverlochy--the black name of it rang in my head like a tolling bell as I sought to doze for a little in Dalness house. The whole events of the scandalous week piled up on me: I no sooner wandered one thought away in the mists of the nether mind than a new one, definite and harassing, grew in its place, so that I was turning from side to side in a torture-rack of reflection when I should be lost in the slumber my travel and weariness so well had earned me. Something of an eeriness at our position in that genteel but lonely house lay heavy on me too: it had no memories of friendship in any room for me; it was haunted, if haunted at all, with the ghosts of people whose names we only breathed with bitterness in the shire of Argile. And constantly the wind would be howling in it, piping dismally in the vent of the room the minister and I were in together; constant the rain would be hissing on the embers of the fire; at a long distance off a waterfall, in veering gusts of greater vehemence, crashed among its rocks and thundered in its linn. M’Iver, who was the first to take watch for the night, paced back and forth along the lobbies or stood to warm himself at the fire he fed at intervals with peat or pine-root Though he had a soldier’s reverence for the slumbers of his comrades, and made the least of noises as he moved around in his deer-skins, the slightest movement so advertised his zeal, and so clearly recalled the precariousness of our position, that I could not sleep. In an hour or more after I lay down M’Iver alarmed the advance-guard of my coming sleep by his unconscious whistle of a pibroch, and I sat up to find that the cleric was sharing my waukrife rest He had cast his peruke. In the light of a cruisie that hung at the mantel-breas he was a comical-looking fellow with a high bald head, and his eyes, that were very dark and profound, surrounded by the red rings of weariness, all the redder for the pallor of his face. He stretched his legs and rubbed his knees slowly, and smiled on me a little mournfully. “I’m a poor campaigner,” said he; “I ought to be making the best of the chance we have; but instead I must be thinking of my master and patron, and about my flock in Inneraora town.” I seized the opportunity as a gled would jump at a dove. “You’re no worse than myself,” I said, rising to poke up the fire; “I’m thinking of Argile too, and I wish I could get his defalcation--if that it may be called--out of my mind. Was it a--was it--what you might call a desertion without dignity, or a step with half an excuse in policy? I know MacCailein had an injured arm.” Gordon rose and joined me at the fireside. He seemed in a swither as to whether I was a fit confidant or not in such a matter, but at last would appear to decide in my favour.