around and below the Highland shelter where Ian
lay, fugitive, like thousands of others, after Culloden. The Prince
had stayed to give an order to his broken army. _Sauve qui peut!_ Then
he, too, became a fugitive, passing from one fastness to another of
these glens and the mountains that overtowered them. The Stewart hope
was sunk in the sea of dead hopes. Cumberland, with for the time and
place a great force and with an ugly fury, hunted all who had been in
arms against King George.

Ian Rullock couched high upon a mountain-side, in a shelter of stone
and felled tree built in an angle of crag, screened by a growth of
birch and oak, made long ago against emergencies. A path, devious and
hidden, connected it first with a hut far below, and then, at several
miles' distance, with the house of a chieftain, now a house of terror,
with the chieftain in prison and his sons in hiding, and the women
watching with hard-beating hearts. Ian, a kinsman of the house, had
been given, _faute de mieux_, this old, secret hold, far up, where at
least he could see danger if it approached. Food had been stored for
him here and sheepskins given for bedding. He was so masked by
splintered and fallen pieces of rock that he might, with great
precautions, kindle a fire. A spring like a fairy cup gave him water.
More than one rude comfort had been provided. He had even a book or
two, caught up from his kinsman's small collection. He had been here
fourteen days.

At first they were days and nights of vastly needed rest. Bitter had
been the fatigue, privation, wandering, immediately after Culloden!
Now he was rested.

He was by nature sanguine. When the sun had irretrievably blackened
and gone out he might be expected at least to attempt to gather
materials and ignite another. He was capable of whistling down the wind
those long hopes of fame and fortune that had hung around the Stewart
star. And now he was willing to let go the old half-acknowledged boyish
romance and sentiment, the glamour of the imagination that had dressed
the cause in hues not its own. Two years of actual contact with the
present incarnations of that cause had worn the sentiment threadbare.

Seated or lying upon the brown earth by the splintered crag, alone
save for the wheeling birds and the sound of wind and water and the
sailing clouds, he had time at last for the rise into mind, definitely
shaped and visible, of much that had been slowly brewing and forming.
He was