other known Douglas sept. After that the shears are at work. My note at the end of my researches was, "merged in the burgesses of Edinburgh." Hardriding showed a similar tale, save that the Homes stood for the Covenant. One of them, Piers or Patrick, swung in the Grassmarket, and was the subject of the eulogies of Wodrow and Patrick Walker. An odd type of saint, his godliness was proved chiefly by his ferocity against the King's officers, for whom he would lie in wait behind a dyke with a musket. He died gallantly, declaiming the 23rd Psalm. The Jacobite rising brought Hardriding round to the side of Cauldshaw. Home and Douglas rode south together, and the fate of the first at any rate is clear. He fell in the rout of Preston, charging with a mouthful of oaths and texts. He left landless sons who disappear into the mist, and the ancient name of Home of Hardriding died in the land. David Hume, the philosopher, in his cups used to claim kin with the house, but it is recorded that David's friends did not take him seriously. ས་ About that time I used to try to analyse the impression the Green Glen made upon me. I went to it often and in all weathers, but especially in the soft June days and the flaming twilights of October. At first I thought that the attraction was the peace of it, Wordsworth's "sleep that is among the lonely hills." Certainly it was very quiet and hallowed, with that brooding stillness which is a positive thing and not a mere absence of unrest. I have gone there, worried and distraught, and returned at ease with the world. Once, I remember, I came to it after fighting a forlorn bye-election in an English slum, with my brain fagged and dull and my nerves a torment. The Glen healed me, plunging me into the deeps of cool old-world shadows. But I soon discovered that the charm was not an opiate, but a stimulant. Its spell was the spell of life. It stirred the blood, comforting failure and nursing hope, but it did not lull to sleep. Once after a bad illness I went to Hardriding to rest, but I could not face the Glen. It only fevered a sick man. Its call was to action, and its ancient genius had no love for weaklings. Often I tried to test it, to see if others could feel as I did. I was ridiculously unsuccessful. The sportsmen who frequented Hardriding, finding no grouse in the Glen, fought shy of it, and if chance took them there, lamented the absence of heather. "Pretty place," one young man observed to me, "but no more Scotch than my hat. It might be Sussex. Where's the brown heath and shaggy wood? What! There isn't cover for a tomtit. It's a nasty big slice out of Harry's shooting to have that long bare place taking up room." It was too remote for ladies to picnic in, but one who penetrated as far called it "sweet," and said it reminded her of Dartmoor. The people of the neighbourhood were no better. Keepers took the same view as the Hardriding sportsmen, and the farmer whose lease covered it spoke of it darkly darkly as "Poaverty Neuk." "Food for neither man nor beast," he said. "Something might be done with phosphates, but I've no money to spend. It would make a grand dam if any town wanted a water-supply." Good business-like views, but no hint anywhere of the strangeness which to me had made it a kind of sanctuary. There was one exception, the shepherd of the Nine Stane Rig. He was a young man, with a fiery red head and a taste for poetry. He would declaim Burns and Hogg with gusto, and was noted at "kirns" and weddings for his robust rendering of songs like "When the Kye come Hame" and "Robin Tamson's Smiddy." I used to accompany him sometimes on his rounds, and he spoke to me of the Green Glen. it. Ye "It's a bonny bit," he once said, waving his arm towards the Green Dod. "And there's ae queer thing about Sheep'll no bide in it. may pit a hirsel in at nicht, and every beast'll be on the tap o' the rig by the mornin'. How d'ye account for that? Mr Yellowlees says the feedin's no guid, and that it wants phosphates. I dinna agree wi' him. I've herdit a' my days, and I never saw better feedin' than by yon burnside. I've no just fawthomed it yet, but I've an idea o' my ain. I think the glen is an auld kirkyaird. I mind when I herdit in Eskdalemuir there was a bit on the hill whaur Covenanters had been buried, and the sheep were aye sweir to gang near it. Some day I'm thinkin' o' gettin' a spade and howkin'. I micht find something queer... VI. I came to regard the Green for several years. I can see Glen as my own exclusive him now as I first knew him, property, which shared with a big solemn young man, too me a secret. It was a pleas- heavy for elegance, and an ant intimacy, and I had re- awkward weight for a horse. signed myself to its limits, We met first one spring at conscious that the curtain of Valescure, and a lonely fortthe past was drawn too close night established a kind of to allow more than one little friendship between us. He chink to be seen. Then one was a modest being, full of day Fate brought halting sympathies and inacross my path. terests, for which he rarely found words. His family had Linford I had known him slightly been settled for two gen- he did not fit in with the erations in Australia, sheep- world around him. I used to farming in the good days think it would have been when the big profits were better if he had never left made. His father had made Australia. There he had a a second fortune in a gold ready-made environment; here mine, and, disliking the land in England he had to make legislation of the country, had his own, and he did not seem sold his farms and brought his to have the knack of it. boy to England. An undis- People liked him, and thought tinguished progress through a him, for all his stiffness, a public school and Oxford had good fellow. But he never left him without a profession, accepted anybody or anything and, his father having died, as his own; he was always with no near relations, and a the observant and sympathetic ridiculous amount of money. stranger. I began to realise He should have been a soldier, that my friend, with all his but somehow had missed his advantages, was desperately chance. The man was in no homeless. way slack, but he gave me the impression of having no niche to fit into. He was very English in speech and manners, but he seemed to stand outside all the ordinary English occupations and look on. Not that he didn't do most things well. He was a magnificent shot, a first-rate horseman, and the best man to sail a boat I have ever met. He read much, had travelled considerably, and had a keen interest in scientific geography. I thought he had found a job when he took a notion of exploring the Brahmaputra gorges, but the expedition fell through and his interest flagged. He belonged to many clubs, and had a few hundred acquaintances; but beyond myself I don't think he had a friend. He used to come to see me, and I tried to understand what puzzled him. For puzzled he was-not unhappy or disillusioned, but simply puzzled with life. Somehow To myself, as I thought about him, I prescribed marriage. Vix ea nostra VOCO might have been his motto about most things, but in a wife he would find something his very own. The thing was obvious, but I saw also that he would be a hard fellow to marry. He was hopelessly shy and curiously unimpressionable. I do not remember that he ever spoke to me of any woman, and he avoided every chance of meeting them. I only once saw his tall figure at a dance, when he looked like nothing so much as Marius among the ruins of Carthage. Hunting was his main hobby, and one January I found myself staying under the same roof with him in the Cottesmore country. He was, as I have said, a bold and fine rider, but he had to know his horse, and on this occasion our host mounted both of us. There was an ugly banked fence where he misjudged his animal's powers, and came down in a heap on Did you I has an odd crest. ever inquire about it?" a hardish bit of ground. thought his neck was broken, and prepared for the worst, as I helped three other whitefaced men to get him clear. But it was only a slight concussion, a broken finger, and a dislocated shoulder. He had a bad night, but next day was little the worse for his fall, and, frost having set in, I spent most of the afternoon in his bedroom. He wore a ring which I had often noticed, a little engraved carnelian in a heavy setting of Australian gold. In doctoring his hand it had been removed, and now lay on the dressingtable. We were talking idly of runs and spills, and, as we talked, I picked it up and examined it. The stone was old and curious. There was no motto, and the carving seemed to be a heart transfixed by an arrow. I thought it the ordinary trumpery love-token-Cupid and his darts-when I noticed something more. The heart was crowned, and the barb transfixing it was not an arrow but a spear. The sight roused me to the liveliest interest. For the cognisance belonged to one house and one house alone. It was Douglas of Cauldshaw who had carried the family badge with this strange difference. Mary of Scots, it was said, had given them the spear, for to the last they had stood by that melancholy lady. "Where did you get this?" I asked. "What? The ring? It was my father's. An ugly thing." I looked at it again. "It He said No. He knew little heraldry, and didn't want to pretend to what didn't belong to him. Then he corrected himself. He thought that the thing was a family relic, right enough. His father had got the stone in turn from his mother, and had had it reset. He thought, but he wasn't sure, that it had been a long time in his grandmother's family. "What was her name?" I asked eagerly. The answer was disappointing. "Brown," he said. "They had the Wooramanga place." I asked if they came from Scotland. "No," he said. "They were Yorkshire, I think. But wait a bit. I think-yes -I have heard my father say something about the Browns being Scotch-Brouns, you know." This was a false scent and I tried again. But Linford had nothing to tell me. He had no family papers or jewels or pictures, nothing but the one ring. I could see that he was puzzled at my interest, and to my horror offered to pay the Heralds' College to investigate matters. I made him promise to let the Heralds alone, and tried to get more about his grandmother. She had been a tall thin old lady, as he remembered her, with a northcountry accent. She had disliked Melbourne intensely. That was all he could tell; not a saying or a rhyme or a memory to link her with those who had borne the ring's cognisance. I heard, however, another startling thing that afternoon. Linford, blushing delightfully, confessed that he was in love. He had no chance, of course, wasn't good enough, and all the rest of it. When I heard that the lady was Virginia Dasent I was inclined to agree with him. Miss Dasent was very high game for Linford to fly at-or for anybody. VII. any of the sad homeless vulgarity of the denationalised. She was a fervent patriot, and had a delicious variety Language is too coarse a ever met. Not that she had medium in which to give a true portrait of Miss Virginia. Airy diaphanous colours and the sharp fineness of marble are needed; and something and something of the national humour. But more, something to recapture I could not fit her in with that grace, wild and birdlike her great continent. Indeed, and only half mortal, which I could not place her anyfor three seasons turned all our where in any society. She heads. She was an astound- belonged to some fanciful ing success. Coming from no- world of her own; but all where, and as innocent as a the time she seemed to me child of ambition, she made to be looking for something every man her most hopeless -perhaps for her lost maand humble servant. I think terial heritage. her charm was her pure girlishness-neither childish nor womanly, you understand. She had the air of one who faces the world frankly but does not accept it. She was a changeling, a wanderer, a dainty solitary figure on the weary old roads of life. I remember thinking, when I first saw her, that she might have stood for a statue of incarnate Wonder. I was more interested, however, in Linford than in Miss Dasent. I could find out no more from him about his forebears, but I wondered if the Glen could tell me anything. Supposing I took him there, unprepared, of course, by any warning of mine, might not he feel the spell of it? If he did, I would be convinced of the Douglas blood; for I was certain that not otherwise would so prosaic a being feel so subtle a charm. I knew her a little, well enough to see the hopelessness of my friend's case. She was an American - from one of the Carolinas, I believe; and Lady Amysfort took her about in London. I do not think that they were related. I hope my friends beyond the Atlantic will forgive me for saying that Miss Virginia was like no American I have I were alone in the house. VOL. CXCI.-NO. MCLV. I persuaded him to take the Hardriding shootings; with an option to purchase, too, for Harry's finances were now past praying for. The chance came two days before the Twelfth, when he and D |