"Halcro," she said, "it is not this way I can see you turned from my father's door in the rain and the wind, and with that wound in your foot. Pm sorry he spoke to you like that, for I'm sure you'll be tired and weary. "I have brought you some oatcake--see. Eat it, while I mend your foot." Then she knelt down before me on the wet, mossy rock, took a piece of clean linen from under the cloak that covered her, and wiped clean my wound. With her fingers she gently drew over the torn skin, and taking another piece of white cloth bandaged it neatly round my ankle. While she was so employed I informed her of my fight with the otter and the loss of my dog, and her gentle sympathy was sweet to my troubled spirit. And then I told her where she might find the otter's skin, and how she should make use of it. "There, now," she said, putting a pin through the bandage and rising to her feet, "that will serve till you get home." "It's real kind of you to do this for me, Thora," I said, touched by the girl's tenderness, "and I will not forget this. No, not as long as I live;" and I think there was a tremor in my voice--at least I felt what I said. "But," I continued, "what will they say to you at Crua Breck, if they hear you have done this thing?" "Halcro, I have done nothing but what I have been told to do. Before you knocked at the door, my father was saying we should aye 'do as we'd be done by.' In that I have obeyed him. But I must run back now, or they will miss me. See you give care to the foot. Fare ye well!" And with that she hastened back to the farm, leaving me to ponder over her manner of applying that golden rule which her father had, while teaching it, so grievously failed to practise. I made my way onward to Lyndardy--sadly, it is true, but with a strange new feeling in my heart for this blue-eyed maiden who, in defiance of her family, had helped me in my weariness and distress. A short distance from the place where Thora left me, I came to the ruined cottage of Inganess. As I approached I heard a click-clicking noise, by which I surmised there was some person within the ruined walls. A dog came out to meet me at the door, wagging its tail in welcome. It was the very counterpart of my own dead Selta, and I knew well whom to expect in the cottage even before I entered. Seated on the floor under shelter of a part of the roof that had not fallen in, was an old man, with locks of silver hair appearing under his blue bonnet, and hanging with a curl about his neck. The clicking sound I had heard proceeded from a flint and the back of a knife, with which the old man was endeavouring to strike a light to kindle the little pile of faded heather that lay in a corner. When I looked in he raised his eyes and said with surprise: "Ah! Halcro, lad. Travelling on a day like this? Why, ye're as wet as myself. But come in, come in here. It's a poor house; but ye're real welcome. And where's your dog?"