“What then?” The Prince passed a hand across his eyes, turned with the smile that drew men to his side. “Your pardon, Sir Jasper. I’ve been up the hill o’ dreams, since action is denied me. What then? Why, the road ahead, and each day’s hazard as it comes.” The next day, as they marched out of Leek, in Staffordshire, Sir Jasper rode back along the line of march to see that Maurice, his younger born, was proving himself a good deputy in command of the Lancashire men. On his way through the scattered units that made up this army of the Prince’s, he was met by a Highlander who came down the road on foot, carrying a mirror--a little, oak-framed thing that he had begged from a cottage where they had given him food and drink--and he was halting, now and then, to hold it up and look into it with pious fervour. And then again he would dance and caper like a child with a new toy before halting for another glance at it. The man’s antics were so droll, the humour of it all so unexpected, that Sir Jasper checked his horse. “What do you see there, my friend?” he asked, pointing to the mirror. He spoke a little Gaelic, which he had learned, with some hardship, from Oliphant of Muirhouse and other night-riders who had called at Windyhough during the past years. The Highlander, hearing his own tongue, spoke as to a friend. “What do I see? My own face, and I’ve not seen it since I left Skye.” “Well, it’s a face worth looking at,” said the other, passing an easy jest. “You’ll not be taken--alive--by any man in England; but I fear for you among the women.” And the man laughed pleasantly. And then, with surprising swiftness, the Skye gladness, that is never far from the mists o’ sorrow, gave way to passionate tears. “It carried me back, this bit o’ magic,” he said, in the swift, tender speech for which there are no English words--“back to Skye, and the blue hills i’ the gloamingtide, and the maid who would not have me at a gift. I used to go down by the burn, where the deep pool lies under the rowans, and see my face there--that was when I was courting Jock Sinclair’s maid in last year’s summer, and she said I’d a face to scare crows away with, but none for a lass that had the pick o’ Skye to choose from.” “And you lost her, and came south to see if the yellow-haired laddie could give you likelier work?”