'We have no decided ghosts, thank Heaven!' said Eveline, laughing, and all unconscious of Holcroft's manner. 'There are none even in the palaces of Holyrood or Falkland, where terrible things have been done, so why should there be in poor old Dundargue? But a spot close by where we are now lunching is the alleged scene of a curious event--a very dark tradition in our family history.' 'Why recur to a story so absurd?' said Allan. But she was pressed to explain herself, and with a shy, sweet smile in her eyes as she glanced from time to time at Evan Cameron, and a wonderfully musical modulation of voice, she told her tale, but not quite as old nurse Nannie had told it to her. 'The deep, rocky dell that lies between this and Dundargue, a few miles distant, was ever in past times what we find it now, covered with dense forest-trees, mingled with alders and silver birches so thickly as to exclude the rays of the sun, and it was said to be the haunt of a Urisk or mountain-goblin--a species of fiend which, Sir Walter Scott says, tradition avers to have had a figure half-man and half-goat.' 'In short, the Grecian satyr of classical antiquity,' said Allan, laughing. 'Be that as it may, the existence of this particular Urisk was never fairly proved until the days of one of our ancestors, Malise Graham of Dundargue, who fought at the battle of Ben Rinnes against the Reformers, and had in hiding in the "Priest's Hole," as it is still called, in the keep, a wandering Scottish Benedictine, known only as James of Jerusalem. 'Now, Malise Graham had an only daughter, Muriel, a girl possessed of that rare and soft beauty----' 'Which is still the inheritance of her family,' said Sir Paget, with a most portentous jerk of his head. 'Please not to interrupt me, or I shall stop,' exclaimed Eveline, with unconcealed annoyance. 'Muriel, in her walks near Dundargue, had made--unknown to her family--the acquaintance of a handsome young stranger of winning manners and prepossessing appearance. 'In the secluded life led in those days by a maiden of rank, such an event was of deep and peculiar interest; love speedily became the sequel, and in truth the object of it seemed to have been a very loveable fellow. Thus it was, with many bitter tears, that one evening she told him that her frequent absence from home had been remarked, and that she must meet him no more in that wooded hollow, especially as it was the haunt of goblins and other evil spirits. 'On hearing this, the handsome stranger laughed till all the dell seemed to re-echo, caressed her tenderly, and, after urging her on peril of her truth and soul to come to the trysting-place at least once again, left her in haste, as some one was seen to approach them.