Though her passing away had been long expected, her death was accompanied by the omens and mysterious warnings then and still so universally believed in among the Highlanders. Rob's grey staghounds howled mournfully the livelong night, a sure sign that they had seen what the eyes of men could not--the shadow of Death enter the house of Muirlaggan; and Paul Crubach, now aged, half-blind, and bent with years, averred that on last Midsummer-eve he had beheld her figure pass before him into the churchyard of Balquhidder with a shroud _high_ upon her breast, a certain token that her death was close at hand. On the day preceding the funeral, and before the clan, tenants, and gillies assembled to drink the dredgie, he came close to the chair of Rob, who was seated at window, full of thought. "Paul, you have been absent some days," said Rob kindly to the old man, "and at your years----" "I have been on Inchcailloch, and there I spent three nights," said he, with unusual solemnity. "Three dreary nights they must have been," said Rob, with a sad smile; "a ruined church for shelter and the graves of the dead below you." "But I slept thereon, knowing that the dead would give me counsel just and true; and in my dreams there appeared unto me twice one whom I knew to be Dugald Ciar Mhor." "How knew you this?" "By his mouse-coloured hair and beard, and he told me--told me----" "What--what?" asked Rob, impatiently; "oh, Paul--Paul--Dugald lies in his grave in Glenlyon." "It matters not--he told us to _beware of Athole_!" "Paul, is not this mockery, and at such a time? Beware of Athole? We have done little else for these twenty years past." "Above the graves of the dead we get counsel just and true," repeated poor, old, half-witted Paul, ignorant that, sixteen centuries before, Pomponius Mela recorded a similar idea. The escapes of Rob had been so numerous and so desperate that they became a byeword--a joke in the Highlands, where the people were wont to say,--"You might as well attempt to say MacNab thrice with your mouth shut as attempt to catch Rob Roy;" and believing himself to be singularly favoured by fortune in that matter, he paid but little attention to the warning of Paul till about sunset, when his son Ronald came running in bareheaded and breathless from a cattle-fold to announce that a party of soldiers were rapidly approaching the house! The natural grief which Rob was enduring for the death of his mother turned into exasperation. He now kept fewer men about him than had been his wont in other times, and it chanced that, though some hundreds would muster for the funeral on the morrow, there were not ten in the house at this desperate crisis!