rkened rapidly as the long-pent sea-mist overflowed the
cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face
of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple
message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of
"Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years,
which seemed completely identical with signatures in the family
chartularies.

By this time Stair had finished his letter to Patsy, but with unusual
care he corrected it, and had it recopied before it was time to set out.
He would send it on to Jean that night, and it would be in Patsy's hands
before these wise people, to whom she had not written, had done taking
counsel together. Meanwhile he stood at the door of the Bothy, looking
across the dim wastes of white, hardly a single heather-bush showing up
under the solid cover of snow. Only here and there he could see a deep
black gash which was the side of a moss-hag at the bottom of which a
pool of ink-black water lay frozen solid.

Nevertheless, in spite of the stern grip of winter, there was a tingle
in his blood and a difference, subtle but quite unmistakable, which told
of a change.

Spring was in the air. Far-off as yet, and only, as it were, a
conditional promise, there came a softness on the light airs that came
breathing up over the sea, which told that the frost-sting was gone. The
snow had stopped creaking underfoot, and the march would be
easier--which would be just as well, for they had a long road and a dark
before them, and Julian Wemyss was neither by age nor training an expert
hill-man.

But something else oppressed Stair's mind. The soft breathing off the
sea would melt the snow, clear away the ice and lay the Bothy of the
Wild open to attack. At Cairnryan the press-gang would be re-formed.
They might find their way to a spot to which they had once been led,
and--most important of all, some night towards the dark of the moon, the
_Good Intent_ would be seen, between the star-shine and the luminous
sea, making her way up the firth with the first "run" of the year.

And with her Julian Wemyss would depart for Lisbon on his way to Vienna,
where he would prepare the way for the future Princess of Altschloss.

Stair's lips tightened. He watched the treacly pour of the yellow fog
thickening about him. His eyes noted mechanically the precise shade of
darkness when it would be wise for them to set out for the High Stile,
but