It now rested with him, by the utterance of a single word, or little more, to save the missing one from a miserable and lingering death; but that word remained unuttered, and with a grim and mocking smile upon his coarse lips, and a gleam of fiendish joy in his watery gray eyes, he proceeded to his sanctum, up the old turret stair, without the sensation of his steps going downward according to the household tradition. 'Lindsay lost in this storm!' he thought. 'How came he to tumble or to be thrown down there--thrown, by whom?' he added mentally, for his mind was ever prone to evil. 'Then I am not wrong--it _was_ his voice I heard at the bottom of the Kelpie's Cleugh! Ha! ha! let him lie there till the greedy gleds pick his bones to pieces! Well--come what may, I have had no hand in _this_!' he continued, thinking doubtless of the charge of No. 5 aimed at Captain Elliot. Roland had often goaded Hawkey to the verge of madness by his cool, haughty bearing and unassailable scorn, even at times when the latter secretly amused him by the 'society' airs he strove to assume; but Hawkey's time for vengeance seemed to have come unexpectedly and all unsought for; and in fancy still he seemed to glare gloatingly down into the dark chasm where the pale sufferer lay in his peril, doubtless with many a bone broken, and the waters of the burn rising fast, for the rain was falling in torrents, and there was a _spate_ in all the mountain streams. Hawkey threw off his soaked coat, invested his figure in a loose, warm _robe de chambre_, and took a bottle of his favourite 'blend' from his private cellarette, after which he threw himself into an easy-chair, with his feet upon another, and strove to reflect. 'I always thought, if I could get rid of that fellow Lindsay by fair means or foul, this place would certainly be mine, unless Deb plays the fool--mine! The girl in my way is nothing, yet I may have her too, and if not, the _other_ one with the yellow hair. After what I saw by a gleam of the Macfarlanes' lantern to-night, the way seems pretty clear now!' He tugged his straw-coloured moustache, and after fixing his eyes with a self-satisfied glare on vacancy for a full minute, rang the bell for supper imperiously. Mr. Hawkey Sharpe was one who never troubled himself about the past, and seldom about the future; his enjoyment was in the present, and the mere fact of living well and jollily without having work to do. Just then he was pretty full of alcohol and exultant hope--two very good things in their way to lay in a stock of. He cared little what he did, but he dreaded greatly discovery in any of his little trickeries. To him the world was divided into two portions, those who cheat and those who are cheated.