Quentin Kennedy loved the venerable dominie, but was undoubtedly bored by his pedantry, and to escape it, once actually disappeared for three entire days, to the utter dismay of the whole household at Rohallion, when it was naturally supposed that he had been kidnapped by gipsies, or carried off by the smugglers, who frequented the coves in the rocks when the nights were dark and gusty; that he had been carried off by the pressgang from Ayr, or had fallen over the cliffs when bird-nesting, until Elsie Irvine arrived at the castle, in tears and tribulation, to announce that he had cunningly secreted himself in the "saut-backet" of her husband's clinker-built boat, and gone with the little fleet from the adjacent bay to the herring fishery. When Lady Winifred's old friend and school companion, Eleonora Hamilton (then Countess of Eglinton) visited the castle with her two unmarried daughters, the Ladies Lilias and Mary--which she did once yearly--it was always a happy time for Quentin; for then he had two little companions with whom to romp and swing in the old terraced gardens; for whom to gather birds' eggs and butterflies in the old woods of Rohallion, and before whom he could exhibit his boyish skill in shooting at the butts, or hooking a brown trout in the Girvan or the Doon; but of the two, his chief friend and playmate was the fair-haired, blue-eyed, and softly-voiced little Lady Mary, with whom he generally opened the dance at the annual kirn, or harvest-home, which Lord Rohallion always gave to the field-labourers in the great barn of the home-farm, and on these occasions, the brightest ribbons that Maybole could produce, together with the dominie's violin and Pate's pipes, were in full requisition. On a November night, about four years after the boy's arrival at Rohallion, his two friends, the dominie and ex-quartermaster, were seated in the latter's apartment discussing, which they did very frequently, the boy's pranks and progress, with a pipe of tobacco and a jug of hot toddy at the same time. John Girvan's "snuggery," as he termed it, was in a square tower at an angle of the barbican wall of the old castle. The loopholes for defence by arrows or arquebusses yet remained under the window-sills, to enfilade all approach to the gate-way. They had been made with special reference to the English and the Kennedies of Kilhenzie; but there was a chance now that "the French might come by the same road." The chamber was small, but very cosy, papered with a queer old pattern over the wainscoting; the walls were of vast strength, the windows arched, the fire-place deep, and lined with shining Delft squares of the Puritan times, representing bulbous-shaped Dutch skaters, and the instructive old Scriptural story of Susannah and the Elders. The dark oak floor was minus a carpet, for the quartermaster had been long enough under canvas and in barracks to despise such a luxury.