In the meantime Ronald, his pipes not being then needed, had wandered out into the cold night-air. There were some stars visible, but they shed no great light; the world lay black enough all around. He went idly and dreamily along the road—the sounds in the barn growing fainter and fainter—until he reached the plateau where his own cottage stood. There was no light in it anywhere; doubtless Maggie had at once gone to bed, as she had been bid. And then he wandered on again—walking a little more quietly—until he reached the doctor’s house. Here all the lights were out but one; there was a red glow in that solitary window; and he knew that that was Meenie’s room. Surely she could not be sitting up and listening?—even the skirl of the pipes could scarcely be heard so far; and her window was closed. Reading, perhaps? He knew so many of her favourites—’The Burial March of Dundee,’ ’Jeannie Morrison,’ ’Bonny Kilmeny,’ ’Christabel,’ the ’Hymn before Sunrise in the Valley of Chamounix,’ and others of a similar noble or mystical or tender kind; and perhaps, after all, these were more in consonance with the gentle dignity and rose-sweetness of her mind and nature than the gambols of a lot of farm-lads and wenches? He walked on to the bridge, and sate down there for a while, in the dark and the silence; he could hear the Mudal Water rippling by, but could see nothing. And when he passed along the road again, the light in the small red-blinded window was gone; Meenie was away in the world of dreams and phantoms—and he wondered if the people there knew who this was who had come amongst them, with her wondering eyes and sweet ways. He went back to the barn, and resumed his pipe-playing with all his wonted vigour—waking up the whole thing, as it were; but nothing could induce him to allow one or other of the lads to be his substitute, so that he might go and choose a partner for one of the reels. He would not dance; he said his business was to keep the merry-making going. And he and they did keep it going till between five and six in the morning, when all hands were piped for the singing of ’Auld Lang Syne:’ and thereafter there was a general dispersal, candles going this way and that through the blackness like so many will-o’-the-wisps; and the last good-nights at length sank into silence—a silence as profound and hushed as that that lay over the unseen heights of Clebrig and the dark and still lake below. *CHAPTER IX.* *ENTICEMENTS.*