"Eighteen months ago--fully six months before I was so happy as to know and to love her, at a great hunting match on the braes of Lochaber, I unfortunately pledged my word to Sir Donald that I would go with him to Germany. Like a generous gentleman, he offered to release me from my promise; but a hundred of my people expected that I was to lead them, and I alone; thus it would ill become M'Farquhar to keep his sword in the scabbard when he had pledged his word to unsheath it. I could have made Moina mine before I left the hills of our race; for a missionary priest, who acts as chaplain to her family, Sheumas Stiubhart, or James of Jerusalem, as the Lowlanders call him, offered to unite us secretly at Kill Chuimm; but I would not run the risk of leaving Moina a wedded mourner, a widowed bride, like the dames of Fingal's warriors, who spent half their time sitting upon the seashore, with hair unbound and harp in hand, looking towards the ocean for the return of their absent spouses. Thus, if in three years and three days I come not again, I will hold Moina free to be wooed and free to won by another." Ian's voice quavered, though he endeavoured to assume an air of bravado, but I saw through the sickly effort. "From your gay manner yesterday, Ian, I deemed you happiest of the happy; but, doubtless, every heart has some inward sorrow which the eye sees not." "True, true, the loudest laugh does not always come from the lightest heart." "Thank God!" said I, observing how his dark eye glistened, "that I have no regret of this kind to render yet more sad this day of parting with my home." "Be happy, Philip," said he; "for all who love you truly are here--myself and the hundred brave men of your mother's name, who follow the banner of Mackay." "And you will return in three years?" "If alive, I will return in one year, despite the offers of our Lowland Chancellor, who has promised me a feudal charter of my hereditary estate, to be granted under the Great Seal at Holy rood, on the day we enter Prague. Dioul! as if M'Farquhar valued the right that was held otherwise than as it was won, by the edge of the sword. Nay, nay, as Donald of the Isles said, I hold my lands by _this_ (laying his hand on his claymore), and not by a sheepskin." CHAPTER V. GLUCKSTADT. His Danish majesty, the gallant King Christian IV., whom we were about to reinforce, was at this time waging with the vast forces of the empire, an unequal warfare in the same cause which the great Gustavus Adolphus, a few years after, maintained so successfully, though he did not survive to behold the conclusion of that bitter contest, which from the gates of Prague spread along the banks of the Po and the shores of the Baltic.