This time the invader looked at him closer. He was a handsome boy of eleven or twelve years of age, tall, and rather slender, and although he wore old, worn clothes, he did not look in the least humble or ashamed of them, a thing which struck the Londoner’s mind as reckless and a little bad. Below his kilt of dark green tartan, variegated with stripes of black and white, the boy’s legs and feet were bare, like those of his companions. Above the kilt he had on a shabby jacket of black velvet with tarnished silver buttons, and a round bonnet set on the back of his black curls made a frame for his face. The man repeated his first question in another form. “Do you know Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?” “Do you mean Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House? Or is it the minister?” asked the boy. “No, it’s not the minister. He is a farmer, and they told me his house was just outside the town.” He said “town,” because he had heard it called that on the steamer. But his London eye called it “village.” Two rows of squat houses struggling up from the harbour’s edge to a small kirk just under the ridge of the hill--that was all he could see. “Then that is Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House,” put in another of the boys. The man turned to him. “Has he a young gentleman living with him, named Stuart?” he asked. All eyes were turned to the boy who had been the first to speak. This boy gave a distrustful, searching glance at the stranger. “If that is the Duncan Gilderoy you want, I can take you to him,” he said, rather unwillingly. “Come on, then.” The other boys fell back, staring hard, as their comrade walked off beside the man in the English clothes. The man carried a small travelling-bag in one hand, and before they had gone many yards he offered it to his guide. “Would you like to earn a sixpence?” he said pleasantly. The boy flushed again and frowned angrily. Then he stopped dead, and, turning round, shouted back to the group they had just left: “Here, Jock, carry his bag, and he’ll give you sixpence.” Jock proved to be the boy who had guessed which Duncan Gilderoy the stranger wanted. He darted from the rest, and ran up to seize the bag, and then, having taken possession of it, fell in on the other side of its owner. The Londoner felt he had made a mistake of some kind. The boy who had refused an offer of sixpence commanded his respect. Gazing at him again, it began to dawn upon him that this bare-footed young Highlander carried himself with dignity, and that he held up his head in a way that is not taught in Board-schools. The next moment the boy, aware that he was being studied, lowered his head with a defensive instinct, and glanced at the man out of the corner of his dark eyes. The glance was at once sly and naïve, like that of some bright, wicked bird. “And what is your name, my boy?” the Englishman asked, with a touch of middle-class patronage. He could not quite get the bare feet out of his mind. “I am Alistair Stuart.”