Balcairnie was far too true, generous, and reverent, with too well-balanced a mind in his yeoman estate, to find a further analogy in the situation. But it was on the cards that he should have his thoughts, as he rode on, stooping forward to see and guide his horse in the gathering night and tempest on the rough road, with the feeble woman’s arms clinging to him. For Peggy became forced, in order to keep her seat, to cling tenaciously to the other rider, and let her drooping head rest on his friendly shoulder, as she shook and quivered with the sobs into which she broke out now and then in her distraction and dismay, and as she was further flung here and there by the hard trot over the stones and through the holes, in a painful, perilous mode of locomotion to which she had been totally unaccustomed. Did he ask himself was it thus that Peggy would have held by him and depended on him utterly, had that vision which he was supposed to have entertained for a fleeting moment come to pass long ago--had she been for more than a year now the goodwife of Balcairnie, and had he been taking her home as a common event from kirk, or market, or friendly visit in scenes where she had already established her claim to be treated like the best of the company? Faithful as he was to the laird no less than to Peggy, Balcairnie knew that in such a case it would have been infinitely better for Peggy, whatever it might have been for himself. Other thoughts and associations thronged thickly on the young couple as they rode on in their excitement and suspense. The first snow of the season began to fall blindingly and blow strongly in their bent faces, before they passed between the two battered pillars originally crowned with stone balls, one of which had fallen down and been suffered to lie, like a decapitated head, at the side of the entrance to the avenue. By some means the stone ball had become split in two and could not be replaced on its site. In this condition the two halves always reminded Balcairnie, who was tolerably familiar with Scotch history, though it was the only history he had ever read, of that unlucky De Bohun, Earl of Essex, whose head good King Robert clove with his battle-axe, just to give the blustering champion of England his due, and as an earnest of the feats the warlike monarch was to perform that day on the field of Bannockburn.