To some of those present the stately dinner, served up in the lofty old dining-room, was a kind of mockery; and Maude and Hester, who dreaded they knew not what, made but a pretence of eating, while the presence of the servants proved a wholesome, if galling, restraint to them; but not so to the irrepressible Annot, who talked away as usual to the gentlemen present, and displayed all her pretty little tricks of manner as if no cause for surmise or anxiety was on the tapis. The unusual pallor, silence, and abstraction of Mrs. Lindsay, as she sat at the head of the table, while Jack Elliot officiated as host, were painfully apparent to those who, like Hester, watched her. But she had her own secret thoughts, in which none, as yet, shared! An attempt had been made to injure Elliot, perhaps mortally, under cover of a blunder--a mishap. Had the same evil hand been at work again? A cloud there was no dispelling began to settle over all; conversation became broken, disjointed, overstrained, and the cloud seemed deeper as a rising storm howled round the lofty old house, shook the wet ivy against the windows, and grew in force with the gathering gloom of night. Annot's equanimity amid these influences grieved Maude and annoyed Hester, who recalled her twaddling grief when Roland had been but a few hours absent from her in Edinburgh. 'How can she bear herself so?' said Maude. 'Because she is heartless,' replied Hester; 'and to say the least of her, I never could imagine Annot, with all her prettiness and _espièglerie_, at the head of a household, or taking her place in society like a woman of sense.' Hour succeeded hour, and still there was no appearance of Roland, and the clang of the great iron bell in the _porte-cochère_ was listened for in vain. So the night came undoubtedly on, but what a night it proved to be of storm and darkness! The rain hissed on the swaying branches of the great trees now almost stripped and bare; it tore down the flowers from the rocks on which the house stood, and wrenched away the matted ivy from turret and chimney; the green turf of the lawn and meadows was soaked till it became a kind of bog; the winding walks that descended to the old fortalice became miniature cascades that shone through the gloom, while the wind wailed in the machicolations of the upper walls in weird and solemn gusts, to die away down the haugh below. That a tempest had been coming some of the older people about the place, like Gavin Fowler, had foretold, as that loud and hollow noise like distant thunder that often precedes a storm among the Scottish mountains had been heard among the spurs of the Ochils, and from which in the regions farther North, the superstitious Highlanders, as General Stewart tells, presage many omens, when 'the Spirit of the Mountain shrieks.' All night long the house-bell was clanged at intervals from the bartizan, to the alarm of the neighbourhood.