'That a good son makes a good husband,' said Lady Aberfeldie, archly, and laughing as she tapped her niece's soft cheek with her teaspoon. 'Adages are not to my taste, aunt.' 'Child, what makes you seem so cross to-day?' 'The weather, perhaps,' suggested Eveline. But Olive, who had rather a mutinous expression in her soft face, remained silent. 'This is bad form in our day of joy,' said Lady Aberfeldie, who had been eyeing her closely. 'In society well-bred people always control their emotions--their feelings.' 'Easy enough for them, aunt.' 'How?' 'Because they have seldom any feelings to control.' And to prevent more being said with reference to Allan--a subject she dreaded--Olive Raymond withdrew. CHAPTER IV. THE GRAHAMS OF DUNDARGUE. Who would have imagined that within a few yards of the elegant and stately modern drawing-room in which these three handsome women of the best style were chatting and sipping their tea, there still existed within the old walls of Dundargue a hideous oubliette or bottle dungeon, like those that were in the Castle of St. Andrews and ancient peel of Linlithgow--so named from the French word to 'forget.' Shaped like a bottle, it was--and is--totally dark and of great depth, with no outlet but its narrow mouth, through which prisoners were precipitated and left to die. 'Dante,' says Victor Hugo, when describing that in the Bastille, 'could find nothing better for the construction of his hell. These dungeon-funnels usually terminated in a deep hole like a tub, in which Dante has placed his Satan, and in which society placed the criminal condemned to death. When once a miserable human being was interred there--farewell light, air, life, and hope! It never went out but to the gibbet or the stake. Sometimes it was left to rot there, and human justice called that forgetting. Between mankind and himself the condemned felt an accumulation of stones and jailers, and the whole prison was but one enormous and complicated lock that barred him out of the living world.' From such places the shrieks and wails of despair and death--death from thirst and hunger--never reach the upper air. When the oubliette of Dundargue was examined a few years ago there was found in it a mass of unctuous-looking mould that made those shudder who looked upon it. It was full of skulls and human bones. Of whom those beings had been even tradition was silent; but, as some coins of Edward I. of England were found among the ghastly remains, they were supposed to have been certain English prisoners or fugitives, who, when flying from the siege of Perth, had fallen into the hands of Sir Malise Graham of Dundargue, in the Carse of Gowrie, a relentless enemy of the invaders of his country, who said, grimly, 'A few Englishmen less in the world would make the world all the better,' and, dropping them successively into the oubliette, placed a huge stone over the mouth of it, and 'forgot' all about them.