'Three in the morning,' he muttered. 'It must be all over with _him_ by this time--all over now!' CHAPTER XXII. PELION ON OSSA. The rain and the wind were over; the storm had passed away into the German Sea, as perhaps more than one luckless craft found to its cost between Fife Ness and the shores of Jutland. It was over in the vicinity of Earlshaugh; the sluices of heaven seemed to have emptied themselves at last; but the atmosphere, if clear, was damp and laden with rain, and the masses of ivy, rent and torn by the wind, flapped against the walls of the old manor-house. The hour was early; bright and clear the morning had come from the German Sea, and a freshness lay over all the fields and groves of the East Neuk. After such a terrible night there seemed something fairy-like in such a morning with all its details, but the excitement was yet keen in Earlshaugh. The horse-chestnuts still wore their changing livery of shining gold, and the mountain ash looked gray, but lime and linden were alike nearly stripped of their leaves; and when the breeze blew through the old oaks of the King's Wood the pale acorns came tumbling out of their cups--the tiny drinking-cups of the freakish elves that once abode in the Fairy Den. Old Jamie Spens, the ex-poacher, now came with startling tidings to Earlshaugh. A shepherd's dog--one of those Scottish collies, of all dogs the most faithful, intelligent, and useful, as they can discover by the scent any sheep that may have the misfortune to be overblown by the snow, had been seen careering wildly in the vicinity of the rocky Cleugh, disappearing down it, to return to the verge barking and yelping loudly, as if he had evidently discovered someone or something there. Old Spens had looked down, and too surely saw the young laird lying pale, still, and motionless. 'Dead?' asked a score of voices. 'After sic a nicht and sic a fa' what could ye expect?' said the old man with tears in his eyes as he remembered Roland's kindness to himself, adding, as he shook his grizzled head, 'but I hope no--I hope no.' Spens had found Roland's gun, and a golden pheasant, dead, near the edge of the Cleugh, for which a party at once set out in all haste, Hester and Maude, pale and colourless after such a sleepless night, too impatient to wait for the pony phaeton which Jack Elliot offered to drive, preceding them all, for the scene of the catastrophe was at some distance from the house. 'They laugh longest who laugh last,' muttered Hawkey Sharpe to himself, as--while pausing on the brow of an eminence beyond the Weird Yett--he saw this party setting forth, a large group of servants and keepers with poles and ropes--and he shook his clenched hand mockingly and threateningly as he added, 'do your best, but '"In the midst of your glee, You've no seen the last o' my bonnet and me!"'