For a few minutes Malcolm stood alone in the dim starlight of winter, looking out on the dusky sea, dark as his own future, into which the wind now blowing behind him would soon begin to carry him. He anticipated its difficulties, but never thought of perils: it was seldom anything oppressed him but the doubt of what he ought to do. This was ever the cold mist that swallowed the airy castles he built and peopled with all the friends and acquaintances of his youth. But the very first step towards action is the death-warrant of doubt, and the tide of Malcolm’s being ran higher that night, as he stood thus alone under the stars, than he had ever yet known it run. With all his common-sense, and the abundance of his philosophy, which the much leisure belonging to certain phases of his life had combined with the slow strength of his intellect to render somewhat long-winded in utterance, there was yet room in Malcolm’s bonnet for a bee above the ordinary size, and if it buzzed a little too romantically for the taste of the nineteenth century, about disguises and surprises and bounty and plots and rescues and such like, something must be pardoned to one whose experience had already been so greatly out of the common, and whose nature was far too child-like and poetic, and developed in far too simple a surrounding of labour and success, difficulty and conquest, danger and deliverance, not to have more than the usual amount of what is called _the romantic_ in its composition. The buzzing of his bee was for the present interrupted by the return of Blue Peter with his wife. She threw her arms round Malcolm’s neck, and burst into tears. “Hoots, my woman!” said her husband, “what are ye greitin’ at?” “Eh, Peter!” she answered, “I canna help it. It’s jist like a deith. He’s gauin’ to lea’ us a’, an’ gang hame till ’s ain, an’ I canna bide ’at he sud grow strange-like to hiz ’at ha’e kenned him sae lang.” “It’ll be an ill day,” returned Malcolm, “whan I grow strange to ony freen’. I’ll ha’e to gang far down the laich (_low_) ro’d afore that be poassible. I mayna aye be able to du jist what ye wad like; but lippen ye to me: I s’ be fair to ye. An’ noo I want Blue Peter to gang wi’ me, an’ help me to what I ha’e to du--gien ye ha’e nae objection to lat him.” “Na, nane ha’e I. I wad gang mysel’ gien I cud be ony use,” answered Mrs Mair; “but women are i’ the gait whiles.” “Weel, I’ll no even say thank ye; I’ll be awin’ ye that as weel ’s the lave. But gien I dinna du weel, it winna be the fau’t o’ ane or the ither o’ you twa freen’s. Noo, Peter, we maun be aff.” “No the nicht, surely?” said Mrs Mair, a little taken by surprise. “The suner the better, lass,” replied her husband. “An’ we cudna ha’e a better win’. Jist rin ye hame, an’ get some vicktooals thegither, an’ come efter hiz to Portlossie.” “But hoo ’ill ye get the boat to the watter ohn mair han’s? I’ll need to come mysel’ an’ fess Jean.”