"Ah, to be sure," was the cool reply, fortified with an equally cool smile. "But pray don't hurry yourself. I've lots of leisure time hanging idle on my hands."

"Humph! More than I have," was the retort. "We came here to hunt for a scoundrelly young rat, and I daresay by dawdling the minutes away talking to you we have given the impudent rascal time to escape."

Henry Savile stooped his tall head forward till he brought it on a close level with his companion's. "It is very much to be hoped, for your own sake, Turner, -mind, for your own sake-that you have. And I give you a word of friendly counsel besides. You will do well to leave as little trace behind you of your unmannerly presence here as possible. This cottage belongs to the Bishop of Dunblane, and the inmates are his near relatives. I leave you to judge what sort of thanks you are likely to get for injuring and harassing one who has gained a strong claim upon the King by being converted to his will."

B

CHAPTER XXI.

IN THE BLAIRS KITCHEN.

ISHOP or no bishop, I'll keep a look-out for that insolent young blackguard, his relative. And the day shall yet come when the rascal shall pay not only the debt for his own impertinence, in daring to brave me, but the little debt due for his champion besides."

Sir John Turner was riding back to his quarters at the head of his small company. Half-an-hour since he had bid farewell to the littered cottage and its unexpected guardian, but the thirty minutes of tranquillity had served to increase his smouldering wrath instead of to allay it.

Henry Savile knew the soldier's nature well enough to guess that such would probably be the case, and he framed his warnings accordingly, to those whom he had taken under his charge. As soon as the troopers had left the neighbourhood he also drew away into the resting-place from which their shouts and uproar had led him so opportunely to emerge. But as soon

as night fell he returned, enveloped as on his former visits in the plaids with which he shrouded himself from the McCalls' scrutiny.

"It may be safer for me, in certain quite possible events," he explained that night, "that you should not be able to swear to my identity, and better also for yourselves. Otherwise, believe me, there are

none I would sooner claim for intimate friends than you, for your own sakes, and on account of certain circumstances connected with former days."

He said no more on the subject, and the two he addressed were possessed of too true a politeness to press him with questions. Besides, it may well be that their hearts were too full of personal matters that day to be very keenly alive to other more remote interests. Mistress McCall's gratitude to God for having rescued her son out of the hands of the dragoons, and herself from a broken heart, overpowered everything else. She could scarcely even pay much heed to the earnest recommendations of the unknown friend, that she and Ivie should be very careful to avoid whatever could give the law any handle against them for as long, at any rate, as the present officer held sway in that district.

"He is vindictive and unscrupulous," said Henry Savile warningly, "and knows not how to forgive any offence against himself. Even your near neighbourhood to a relative in authority will prove but a small shield for you, if you permit him to find but an inch of legal ground to start from in oppressing you."

Ivie looked up quickly-" Why then-" he began. He was about to say-"Why then, under those circumstances he had better have been allowed to get at me to-day, after all, and have done with it; for our whole present lives give him a handle against us." But in mercy to his mother he checked his declaration half-way. They had at any rate been delivered out of the enemy's power once, they might be again, and meantime, "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

The evil of that especial day had fallen not only upon the McCalls. It had visited other homes with a far heavier weight of affliction. In the home of the slaughtered Daniel MacMichael a weeping wife sat rocking the cradle of her infant and clasping to her bosom the shattered head of her dead husband. In the morning pitying neighbours had been praying with him around his bed; at night they brought back the mangled body stealthily, that his widow might have the mournful satisfaction of a last look at all the enemy had spared.

Out on the wild, dark moor a wife knelt with dry, burning eyes, trying with the desperation of a fastgrowing despair to discover whether that morning's tragic work had made her too a widow.

Nearly twenty-four hours William Blair had been lying where he had fallen beneath his friend, before Mary Blair's anxious wanderings brought her at last to the spot, where he lay stretched out stiff and cold upon turf sodden and dyed with his blood.

With an agonized cry she had caught sight of the beloved, death-pale face, and cast herself beside her husband, pressing her lips to his. To the lips of a dead man, she had supposed. But she had scarcely touched them when she drew back with a low cry of hope, and fastened her eyes more earnestly upon the white face lying so motionless upon the ground.

The lips were pale and stiff, it was true, but not with the coldness and rigidity of death. A closer inspection showed her that he must at least have had some period of consciousness since receiving the wound, for a strip of his tartan had been torn off, and bound in some weak fashion as a ligature around his leg. This was enough. There might still remain some flicker of the flame of life, and if so, however faint it was, she would set herself to fan it back into a full glow.

She forgot herself, even it might almost be said. that she forgot her love for a time, in her love's work, until hope of success had risen and fallen so often that at last despair threatened to gain the upper hand for once, and finally.

But even as her strength was failing the blessing came. There had been a sound-at least she thought so a low sound of breathing. Perhaps some animal might be in among the gorse-bushes watching her, and it was the breath of that she had heard. She had been disappointed so frequently that she was actually afraid to let herself believe now what she was even sure of.