"Thank you, mother dear; I seem to know that without being told; but I could never talk to you about anything that was not interesting to myself." Here he paused. He would rather have stopped. "Go on, go on, Ian. I am longing to hear." "Well--where was I?--We left at the inn our carriage and horses, and went with our guns far into the forest--all of straight, tall pines, up and up; and the Little island-like tops of them, which, if there be a breath of wind, are sure to be swaying about like the motion of a dream, were as still as the big frosty stars in the deep blue overhead." "What did you want in such a lonely place at that time of the night?" asked the mother. She sat with firm-closed lips, and wide, night-filled eyes looking at her son, the fear of love in her beautiful face--a face more beautiful than any other that son had yet seen, fit window for a heart so full of refuge to look out of; and he knew how she looked though the darkness was between them. "Wolves, mother," he answered. She shuddered. She was a great reader in the long winter nights, and had read terrible stories of wolves--the last of which in Scotland had been killed not far from where they sat. "What did you want with the wolves, Ian?" she faltered. "To kill them, mother. I never liked killing animals any more than Alister; but even he destroys the hooded crow; and wolves are yet fairer game. They are the out-of-door devils of that country, and I fancy devils do go into them sometimes, as they did once into the poor swine: they are the terror of all who live near the forests. "There was no moon--only star-light; but whenever we came to any opener space, there was light enough from the snow to see all about; there was light indeed from the snow all through the forest, but the trees were thick and dark. Far away, somewhere in the mystery of the black wood, we could now and then hear a faint howling: it came from the red throats of the wolves." "You are frightening me, Ian!" said the mother, as if they had been two children telling each other tales. "Indeed, mother, they are very horrible when they hunt in droves, ravenous with hunger. To kill one of them, if it be but one, is to do something for your kind. And just at that time I was oppressed with the feeling that I had done and was doing nothing for my people--my own humans; and not knowing anything else I could at the moment attempt, I resolved to go and kill a wolf or two: they had killed a poor woman only two nights before.