about. Nothing worse can possibly happen to the boys than a cool bed among the heather, with colds in the head to follow. In any case, we can do nothing till the morning, for there are half-a-dozen ways home from Lochrosque. Go quietly to bed, and if they do not turn up for breakfast, we shall send off a party of the gillies to meet them, with materials to break their fast. Jack has always an undeniable appetite; and Leslie, though he takes it more leisurely, runs him hard with the knife and fork."
Grace professed herself so far satisfied, and bade her father good-night. But when he had left her in the pretty bedroom he had carefully seen arranged for her, her anxieties returned, and she sent her maid away. She threw the window open and gazed out upon the soft Highland night. She looked at her snow-white sheets, and contrasted them with a couch in the heather. A bed in the heather was all very well; on the whole, she would have much enjoyed it herself. Couches of fragrant heather-shoots and verdant bracken associated themselves with all the witchery of Scottish poetry; and what could the soul wish better for a canopy than the star-studded vault of the northern heavens? But then there was another side to that picture. Those little-known cousins of hers – one or both – might be, and very possibly were, lying crippled or shattered at the bottom of the craigs, with the carrion-crows and ravens for their sole attendants. In short, when Miss Moray did make up her mind to go to bed, it was to anything rather than untroubled slumbers. Youth, fatigue, and the Highland air were lulling her into dreams, which were changing perpetually to grim phantasmagoria and nightmares. When she rose in the early morning, the cold bath never was more welcome; and as it was, when she had kissed her father's cheek, he noticed the fading of the red Lancastrian roses that had been blooming the evening before in her face.
Meanwhile Leslie and Venables had been still earlier risers, though for very different reasons. Moray's shrewd knowledge of mankind had not deceived him, when he suggested that Jack, under stress of privation, would make a vigorous push for breakfast at Glenconan. Jack might not be sentimental – he was certainly shy as to expressing sentiments; nevertheless he had made an effort and a clutch at Leslie's hand, and said, "You may forget, my good fellow; but you may be sure that I never shall. Henceforward I am yours, for life or death."
Nor did he say much more in the course of the long morning's walk, though possibly, like the parrot of story, he may have thought the more. Till at last, from one of the lower ridges he lifted up his eyes, and saw certain moving figures in the middle-distance of the landscape.
"Look there, Leslie! A relief expedition sent out in search of us. If my note was duly delivered, for the life of me I can't understand the Laird. I should have said he was the very last man in the world to bother about the off-chance of a mishap."
"It's not very likely," Leslie admitted. "But time will show, so it's no use troubling."
"So here you are at last, "shouted Moray when they came within hail; and both the young men were astonished to observe that their good-natured host and uncle was decidedly flushed and choleric. "Here you are, after keeping the household in hot water through half the night,
