me, and felt
the whole true meaning of what it meant to these lairds of the Highlands
to live here, generation after generation, giving to their children the
right of ownership in the ancestral homes; it was just then that Miss
Duggan turned in her seat and pointed with one arm out-thrown toward it.

"That's the Castle. Isn't it too magnificently beautiful for words, Mr.
Deland?" she said, with a suggestion of a catch in her voice at sight
of it. "With those mists wreathing it about, and all its dear, gaunt,
worn turrets piercing the top of the world like that! Now you can
imagine how I feel toward the--the woman who would wrest all this from
Ross, take what is his rightful inheritance from him and give it to a
boy who is only half a Scotsman, and with the blood of another country
running in his veins! Now you can understand why I came all the way to
London to see Mr. Narkom. Look on it, Mr. Deland, and drink in its
beauty. The sight of it is like heaven itself to me."

Cleek did look on it to his heart's fill, and drank so deep of its
majestic beauty as to be well-nigh intoxicated with it. The artist's
soul of the man was afire with the chill grandeur of the place. From
turreted towers rising through the gray mists, like the towers and the
turrets of the Holy City itself, Aygon Castle was like some enchanter's
palace, like some figment of the mind's weaving in those hours of
day-dreams which lie between the dark and the day.

To the left of it a huge watch-tower reared its monstrous head to the
blue-flecked Highland sky, set atop of which stood the figure of a man,
gigantic and wrought in bronze, with the plaid of the Duggans sweeping
across his shoulder and eddying out into a marvellous real billow behind
him, one huge forearm raised in the hand of which was a battle-axe,
standing out black and menacing against the early morning sky.

Cleek swept a hand out to it, while Dollops, silent up to the present,
gave forth the feeling of his Cockney soul in one long-drawn "S'welp
me!" of utter enthusiasm.

"Who is the gentleman of the axe, Miss Duggan?" said Cleek, turning
toward her, his face alight with interest. "What a magnificent thing it
is! And how he stands out against this Highland sky of yours--menacing,
victorious, utterly sublime! Some ancestor, no doubt?"

"_The_ ancestor. The greatest of all that great line of Duggans, or
_Mac_duggans, as it was then," she responded in a hushed, exultant
voice. "Chief of t