venanting prey, and catches the
fearless face of some peasant zealot as he falls pierced with bullets.
Jean weaves her arms round his neck, for once in her life a tender
and fearful woman, pleading that he should withdraw from the fight
and live quietly with her at home, and then, more like herself, she
rages in the moment of his mad jealousy and her unquenchable
anger. To-morrow he would submit to the final arbitrament of arms
the cause for which he had lived, and for which the presentiment
was upon him that he would die, and the quarrel begun between him
and MacKay fifteen years ago, between the sides they represent
centuries ago, would be settled. If the years had been given back to
him to live again, he would not have had them otherwise. Destiny had
settled for him his politics and his principles, for he could not
leave the way in which Montrose had gone before, or be the comrade of
Covenanting Whigs. It would have been a thing unnatural and
impossible. And yet he feared that the future was with them and
not with the Jacobites. He only did his part in arresting fanatical
hillmen and executing the punishment of the law upon them, but he
would have been glad that night if he had not been obliged to shoot
John Brown of Priest Hill before his wife's eyes, and keep guard at
the scaffold from which Pollock went home to God. He had never loved
any other woman than Jean Cochrane, and they were well mated in
their high temper of nature, but their marriage had been tempestuous,
and he was haunted with vague misgivings. What light was given him
he had followed, but there was little to show for his life. His king
had failed him, his comrades had distrusted him, his nation hated
him. His wife--had she forgiven him, and was she true-hearted to him
still? Behind high words of loyalty and hope his heart had been
sinking, and now it seemed to him in the light of eternal judgment,
wherein there is justice but no charity, that his forty years had
failed and were leaving behind them no lasting good to his house or to
his land. The moonlight shining full upon Claverhouse shows many a
line now on the smoothness of his fair girl face, and declares his
hidden, inextinguishable sorrow, who all his days had been an actor
in a tragedy. He had written to the chiefs that all the world was
with him, but in his heart he knew that it was against him, and
perhaps also God.

Once and again Grimond had come into the gallery to summon his master
to