"I daresay she has only walked farther than she intended," said Gimblet, "or perhaps she came to a burn or some place she couldn't get over, and has had to go round a mile or two. Depend on it, that's what's happened. But I promise you that if she is at the castle I will bring her back when I return." CHAPTER XVII Behind the shrubberies, which lay at the back of the holly hedge that surrounded the little enclosed garden outside the library, beyond the end of the battlements, and reached by a disused footpath, a great tree stood upon the edge of the steep hillside and thrust its sweeping branches over the void. Its trunk was grey and moss-grown; moss carpeted the ground between its protruding roots, but the bracken and heather held back, and left a half-circle beneath it, untenanted by their kind. It would seem that all vegetation fears to venture beneath the shade of the beech; and for the most part it stands solitary, shunned by other growing things except moss, which creeps undaunted where its more vigorous brothers lack the courage to establish themselves. Here came Juliet that morning. A week ago, David Southern had shown her the path to the tree. It had been a favourite haunt of his when he was a boy, he told her. It was a private chamber to which he resorted on the rare occasions when he was disposed to solitude; when something had gone wrong with his world he had been used to retire there with his dog, or, more seldom, a book. There he had been accustomed to lie, his back supported by the tree, and hold forth to the dog upon the troubles and difficulties of life and the general crookedness of things; or, if a book were his companion, he would gaze out, between the pages, at distant Crianan clinging faintly to the knees of Ben Ghusy, and watch the swift change of passing cloud and hanging curtain of mist upon the faces of the hills and loch. It had been a place all his own; secret from every one, even from Mark, his companion during all those holidays that he had spent at Inverashiel. Somehow, David told Juliet--and it was a confidence he had seldom before imparted to anyone--he had never quite managed to hit it off with Mark. He couldn't say why, exactly. No doubt it was his own fault; but there was no accounting for one's likes and dislikes. And with quick regret at having betrayed his carefully suppressed feelings in regard to his cousin, David had laughed apologetically, and spoken of other things. Here, then, just as the steamer _Rob Roy_ was drawing close to the wooden landing-stage at the edge of the loch, with Julia Romaninov still standing in the bows; here, because she had once been to this place with him, because without her he had so often sat upon these mossy roots, came Juliet to dream of her love.