"How very thoughtful of him! Then you go at two?" "Yes." The widow gazed at her intently. "I can hardly believe this of Heriot. Is all this his own idea?" Jean flushed slightly, but answered as demurely as ever-- "It is his wish." "Ah, I see!" exclaimed Mrs. Dunbar bitterly, "I thought there was a woman's hand in this affair." "Do you mean another woman's hand?" The injured lady began uneasily to realize that there was a fresh factor in the situation. But who would have dreamt of little Jean Walkingshaw being dangerous? As Madge traveled north that afternoon, uncompromisingly secluded behind a lady's journal, she could not get out of her head the uncomfortable fancy that her trim, fair-haired escort sat like a protecting deity (heathen and sinister) between Heriot and all who desired, even with the most loving purpose, to chasten his faults and moderate the exuberance of his too virile spirit. Jean herself was warmly conscious that some such duty was surely laid upon her. With what less reward could she repay all he had done for her? It will be discovered, however, from the succeeding instalment of facts, that though the guardian angel of Heriot Walkingshaw might go the pace with him thus far, it would probably have been beyond the power even of a genuinely celestial spirit to keep at his shoulder when he spurted. PART IV CHAPTER I Archibald Berstoun of that ilk ("of y' ilk" was the form that most delicately tickled his palate) still dwelt in the fortalice built by his ancestors at a time when to the average Scot the national tartan suggested but an alien barbarian who stole his cattle; and the national bagpipe, the national heather, and the national whisky were merely the noise the brute made, the cover that preserved him from the gallows, and the stuff that gave you your one chance of catching him asleep. (A few reflections on the whirligig of time were here inserted, but have since been omitted, as they were found to occur in a modified form elsewhere.) The castle stood in the lowland part of Perthshire, and was erected by the second of that ilk as a tribute to the dexterity with which his highland neighbors had removed the effects and cut the throat of the first. It was a sober and simple building, steep-roofed and battlemented at the top, turreted at the angles, and pierced with a few narrow windows so irregularly scattered about its gray harled walls as to suggest that no two rooms could possibly be on the same level. Naturally, the architectural genius who illumines the quiet annals of every landed family had knocked out a number of French windows into the lawn and constructed the first story of a Chinese pagoda, in which he proposed to store Etruscan curios with an aviary above; but his descendants had fortunately lacked the funds to complete these improvements. In fact, the stump of the pagoda was now so entirely overgrown with ivy that it had become the traditional fortress of Agricola.