Under his shaggy brows his eyes glared at Calderwood as he spoke; and fiercely he drew his blue bonnet over them, as he hurled his broadsword into its scabbard, struck its basket-hilt significantly, and, grasping his terrified daughter by the wrist, dragged her rudely away. A farewell glance, mute and despairing, was all that the parted lovers could exchange. As for the injurious reproaches of the irate old man, Willie Calderwood heeded them not. He only mourned in his heart this civil and religious war, that had engendered hate and rancour in the breasts of those at whose board he had long been a welcome guest, and who certainly, at one time, loved him well. If Symon of Seafield was rancorous in his animosity, his wife, the Lady Grizel Kirkaldie of Abden, was doubly so. Thus the poor Annora, as she sat by her side, guiding the whirling spindle, or spinning monotonously at her wheel, was compelled, in the intervals of prayer, bible reading, catechizing, and mortification of the body and spirit, to hear the most insulting epithets heaped upon the name of her young and handsome lover, whose figure, as she saw him last at Eglise Marie, with his long, black cavalier plume shading his saddened face, and his scarlet mantle muffling the hilt of the rapier he dared not to draw on _her_ father, seemed ever before her. To prevent their meeting again, Annora was secluded and carefully watched in the upper storey of Seafield Tower; and by her brothers’ fowling-pieces many a stray pigeon was shot, lest a note might be tied under its wing. The tower forms a striking feature on the sea-beaten shore, midway between the Kirkcaldy and Kinghorn-ness. It rests on one side on a mass of red sandstone rock; on the other it was guarded by a fosse and bridge, the remains of which can yet be traced. To the seaward lie the Vows—some dangerous rocks, on which, on a terrific night in the December of 1800, a great ship of Elbing perished with all her crew. A roofless and open ruin now, exposed to the blasts which sweep up the Firth from the German Sea, it has long been abandoned to the seamew, the bat, and the owl, or the ugla, as it was named of old in Fifeshire. But the seclusion of Annora was not required; for, on the very day after the interview which was so roughly interrupted at Eglise Marie, Willie Calderwood, at the head of sixteen troopers, all sturdy "Kailsuppers of Fife," well mounted and accoutred in half armour—_i.e._, back, breast, and pot, with sword, pistol, and musketoon—had departed for the king’s host, and joined the Marquis of Montrose, whose troops, flushed with their victorious battles at Tippermuir, Alford, Aldearn, and the Brig o’ Dee, came pouring over the Ochil mountains, to sack and burn the Castle of Gloom.