For an hour Rupert paced the glen, with gentler thoughts for company than he had known since he first killed a man at the siege of Windyhough. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he remembered to-morrow and its needs, and went back and settled himself to sleep; but he did not lie so near to the Prince as before, lest he overhear him talk again of Miss MacDonald. The next day news came that the soldiery were out among the hills again. The gallant head of Roderick MacKenzie, who had earned a long respite for his Prince, had been taken to London, and men who knew the Stuart had sworn that it bore little likeness to him; and news had been sped north, by riders killing a horse at every journey’s end, that the Prince was still at large among the Highlands. The Glenmoriston men were unmoved by this new trouble. They explained, with careless humour, that their glen was already so stripped of food as to be scarce worth living in; and they went out with their guests into the unknown perils waiting for them as if they went to revelry. And the Prince learned afresh that a man, when his back is to the wall, had best not seek friends among the sleek and prosperous, who have cherished toys to love, but among the outlaws and the driven folk who know the open road of life. It was by aid of the Glenmoriston men, their knowledge of the passes, that the fugitives came safe to Lochiel’s country of Lochaber, that, after dangers so close-set as to be almost laughable--so long the odds against them were--they reached the shore of Loch Moidart and found a French privateer beating about the coast. Those on board the ship were keeping an anxious look-out toward both land and sea; they had been advised that the Prince, with luck, might reach Moidart about noon, and they knew, from sharp experience during their voyage to the bay, that the enemy’s gunboats were thick as flies about the Western Isles. It was an odd company that gathered on the strand while the ship beat inshore with the half of a light, uncertain wind. The Prince was there, Lochiel and Rupert, and a small band of loyal gentry who had been in hiding round about their homes. Yet a beggar in his rags and tatters might have joined them and claimed free passage to the French coast, so far as outward seeming went. Their clothes were made up of odds and ends, begged or borrowed during the long retreat. All were itching from the attacks of the big, lusty fleas that abound along the loyal isles. The one sign that proved them the Stuart’s gentlemen was a certain temperate ease of carriage, a large disdain of circumstance, a security, gay and dominant, in the faith that preferred beggarman’s rags to fine raiment bought by treachery. They did not fear, did not regret, though they were leaving all that meant home and the cosy hearth.