they, was the music of these
contented prisoners. Not Summer's self, in its deepest green, so
beautiful had ever been to them before, as now the mild white of Winter;
and as their eyes were lifted up to heaven, when had they ever seen
before a sky of such perfect blue, a sun so gentle in its brightness, or
altogether a week-day in any season, so like a Sabbath in its stillness,
so like a holyday in its joy! Lovers were they--although as yet they
scarcely knew it; for from love only could have come such bliss as now
was theirs, a bliss that while it beautified was felt to come from the
skies.

Flora sang to Ranald many of her old songs to those wild Gaelic airs
that sound like the sighing of winds among fractured cliffs, or the
branches of storm-tossed trees when the subsiding tempest is about to
let them rest. Monotonous music! But irresistible over the heart it has
once awakened and enthralled, so sincere seems to be the mournfulness it
breathes--a mournfulness brooding and feeding on the same note that is
at once its natural expression and its sweetest aliment--of which the
singer never wearieth in her dream, while her heart all the time is
haunted by all that is most piteous, by the faces of the dead in their
paleness returning to the shades of life, only that once more they may
pour from their fixed eyes those strange showers of unaccountable tears!

How merry were they between those mournful airs! How Flora trembled to
see her lover's burning brow and flashing eyes, as he told her tales of
great battles fought in foreign lands, far across the sea--tales which
he had drunk in with greedy ears from the old heroes scattered all over
Lochaber and Badenoch, on the brink of the grave still garrulous of
blood!

"The sun sat high in his meridian tower,"

but time had not been with the youthful lovers, and the blessed beings
believed that 'twas but a little hour since beneath the Eagle Cliff they
had met in the prime of the morn!

The boy starts to his feet--and his keen eye looks along the ready
rifle--for his sires had all been famous deer-stalkers, and the passion
of the chase was hereditary in his blood, Lo! a deer from Dalness,
hound-driven or sullenly astray, slowly bearing his antlers up the glen,
then stopping for a moment to snuff the air, and then away--away! The
rifle-shot rings dully from the scarce echoing snow-cliffs, and the
animal leaps aloft, struck by a certain but not sudden death-wound. Oh!
for