standstill, and betook himself to cropping the grass by the wayside. So the young lady, in all security, could set one neatly booted foot on the wheel and take a flying leap into her father's arms. It was as well, perhaps, that her cousins did not witness the fervent embrace in which she was clasped before she was landed on the gravel. They could hardly have helped feeling envy and jealousy. As for the trim lady's-maid on the back seat and the shaggy-coated Highland driver, they looked on complacently and indifferently from their very opposite points of view.
Grace Moray had really been harmoniously as she was simply named; for there was grace in her shape and her every gesture. So it struck her father, and not for the first time, as he saw her posing on the carriage-wheel like a domestic Venus. The slight irregularity of her features only added to the piquancy of their expression; there was a laughing sweetness in her soft grey eyes, which seemed to speak of boundless capacities of affectionate companionship, with all the sympathetic versatility that can brighten a life. With the masses of her rich brown hair slightly ruffled under her Spanish hat by her father's hearty embrace, with her clear complexion heightened by the keen mountain-air, and with her eyes glowing with the light of health and beaming at once with excitement and tenderness, she was as desirable a young helpmate and mistress of an establishment as any fond father might wish to welcome.
Circumstances change cases, and there is no reckoning with the unexpected. A few minutes before, Moray had been longing for his male companions; now, he saw in their prolonged absence a special interposition of Providence. His daughter, too, was very well content when she heard of the expedition that left her to a tête-à-tête. The early evening passed quickly enough: they had so much to say as to the present and the future. But when the shadows of the loitering Highland night began to fall, the girl began to feel uneasy. To her there were vague horrors and dangers in the solitudes of those trackless hills, which she had ad- mired and nevertheless half shuddered at in the fading glories of the sunset. Sitting in the snug room, watching through the open window the shadows thickening and widening in the clear gloaming without, her fancy began to work uneasily. And though she knew nothing of the real risks, with which her father was familiar, her growing uneasiness began to communicate itself to him. Left to himself, he might scarcely have given a second thought to the absence of his young friends. Jack Venables's note had told him it was possible. For himself, he had run the gauntlet of serious dangers in his time, and, with innumerable hairbreadth escapes, had always fallen safely on his feet. A night on the hills of Glenconan had seemed nothing to him. Now, however, he found himself, to his own surprise, conjuring up visions of the rugged precipices above Lochrosque, with their precarious foothold and almost invisible goat-tracks; and he remembered Jack Venables's headstrong pluck and impetuous temperament. But he remembered at the same time that Jack was in good company; that Leslie was cool and prudent; that Peter, though stupid, was strong-bodied and trustworthy; and he tried to dismiss his doubts by saying to his daughter –
"Believe me, my dear, there is nothing whatever to be alarmed
