Marjory, shading her eyes from the sun, stood looking on one of the prettiest sights in the world; a herd of red deer dotted over a hill slope, or seen outlined against the horizon line. Paul, from sheer habit also, had slipped to the ground, and had his glass on them. "Splendid royal to the left, Cameron--wonder if we shall get him this year--and, by George, there's the old crooked horn! I remember, Miss Carmichael, trying to put a bullet into him--well, we won't say how many years ago." "What a slaughterhouse a man's memory must be," remarked Marjory, with her head in the air. "Not in this case, at any rate," retorted Paul. "Sometimes I am merciful--or miss; which answers the purpose quite as well." As he spoke the memory of Jeanie Duncan rose quite causelessly to his mind, and he started to his feet impatiently; for somehow little Paul's existence had taken the bloom off his self-complacency in regard to that episode. "Now for the Pixie's loch," he cried gaily. "The ladies have it all their own way there in destruction, if tales be true. I wonder which of us three unfortunate males she will choose as her victim to-day?" Marjory, looking down as they crested the last boulder-strewn rise on the almost black and oily sheet of water in the crater-like cup of the corrie, felt that she did not wonder at the legends which had gathered round the spot. The very perfection of its loneliness, its beauty, marked it as a thing apart from the more familiar charm of the world around it. There seemed scarce foothold for a goat on those pillared cliffs which sank sheer into the dark water, and the streak or two of snow lingering still in a northern recess marked, she felt sure, some deep crevasse hidden from sight by the innocent-looking mantle of white. Nor could one judge of the depth of the lake by the jagged points of rocks which rose here and there from the surface of the water, for, as she stood, she leant against a fragment of some earlier world, which looked as if it must have fallen from the sky, since the vacant place left by such a huge avalanche must have remained visible for ever in the rocks above. So those out yonder might go down and down, forming vast caves where the Pixie might hold her court of drowned, dead men. She turned to look at Paul suddenly, apprehensively; perhaps because, even in her innocence, she recognised instinctively that there, with all its gifts, with all its charm, lay the nature to which the syren's song is irresistible. But he, stopping on the brink to dip his hand into the water, was looking back at her with a laugh. "By Jove!" he said, "isn't it cold? Enough to give anyone the shivers." As he spoke, far out on the glassy glint of water came a speck of stronger light, widening to a circle, widening, widening ever, in softening ripples.