’It was just when the bruit of my father’s death began to go abroad against the Auchendraynes,’ so Marjorie Kennedy again took up her tale, ’and when John Mure the elder began to fear that the matter of the letter would be made manifest, that I again saw the little lad William Dalrymple. One night I observed James Mure leading him rudely by the neck into one of the barred cells which underlie the stables. And to that place with his own hands he carried food and water once every day thereafter. ’Then came to visit John Mure one Sir Robert Montgomery, the Laird of Skelmorlie. And with him they sent the lad, on pretext to be a page at his house of Loch Ranza, which he keeps for the King’s hunting lodge on the Isle of Arran. What befell there I cannot tell, but it was not many weeks before William Dalrymple was back again. And this time they sent him (as he told me afterwards) to the Lowlands of Holland, there to serve in the Lord Buccleuch’s regiment, which, first as a trumpeter and after as a soldier, he did. Nevertheless, being but young, he wearied easily of the stress and chance of foreign war, and so returned as before. ’Then when, in spite of all, the boy came back, and it was told to John Mure that William Dalrymple was again in his native town, he was neither to hold nor to bind. He neither rested nor slept till he had again brought the lad to his house, where he abode for some weeks, but not so closely shut up as before, so that it was often my chance to see him as he came and went about the court, and even to converse with him. But in a little while he vanished, and from that time I saw him no more. ’Now, the bitterness of my life and my desire to bring to justice the murderers of my father caused me at last to quit the house of Auchendrayne. For now I held, as I thought, the strings which would draw mine enemies to their doom. So upon a night I had it set to escape, she that was my maid helping me, with one other that was a body servant of Auchendrayne’s and my tire-woman’s lover. ’When I came out I found a pony waiting for me, and it was my purpose to ride to the house of my kinsman, the Earl of Cassillis. But, as I journeyed, what was my great affrightment to come upon a company of two, who rode some little way before me. I could easily have turned bridle-rein and ridden another way, but for something which came into my heart to make me follow on. For in a trice I recognised the riders to be John Mure and his son, the father being wrapped in his great cloak of grey, as is his custom. And by this I knew him. ’So I followed them, but not very near. And because my beast was a stable companion of their horses, he went after of his own accord—till, by the first breaking touch or morn we came to a waste place upon the edge of the sea, where in a secret dell I dismounted and tied my pony to a broom-bush which shot out over a sandy hollow.