It was the last verse that struck home. It was through no failure of devotion on the part of the faithful Harry that he was now at Inver-Mudal; it was his master that had played him false, and severed the old companionship. And he kept thinking about the little terrier; and wondering whether he missed his master as much as his master missed him; and wondering whether Meenie had ever a word for him as she went by—for she and Harry had always been great friends. Nay, perhaps Meenie might not take it ill if Maggie wrote to her for news of the little dog; and then Meenie would answer; and might not her letter take a wider scope, and say something about the people there, and about herself? Surely she would do that; and some fine morning the answer—in Meenie’s handwriting—would be delivered in Abbotsford Place; and he knew that Maggie would not be long in apprising him of the same. Perhaps, indeed, he might himself become possessed of that precious missive; and bring it away with him; and from time to time have a glance at this or that sentence of it—in Meenie’s own actual handwriting—when the long dull work of the day was over, and his fancy free to fly away to the north again, to Strath-Terry and Clebrig and Loch Naver, and the neat small cottage with the red blinds in the windows. It seemed to him a long time now since he had left all of these; he felt as though Glasgow had engulfed him: while the day of his rescue—the day of the fulfilment of his ambitious designs—was now growing more and more distant and vague and uncertain, leaving him only the slow drudgery of these weary hours. But Meenie’s letter would be a kind of talisman; to see her handwriting would be like hearing her speak; and surely this dull little lodging was quiet enough, so that in the hushed silence of the evening, he, reading those cheerful phrases, might persuade himself that it was Meenie’s voice he was listening to, with the quiet, clear, soft laugh that so well he remembered. And so these first days went by; and he hoped in time to get more accustomed to this melancholy life; and doggedly he stuck to the task he had set before him. As for the outcome of it all—well, that did not seem quite so facile nor so fine a thing as it had appeared before he came away from the north; but he left that for the future to decide; and in the meantime he was above all anxious not to perplex himself by the dreaming of idle dreams. He had come to Glasgow to work; not to build impossible castles in the air. *CHAPTER XI.* *KATE.*