ns she asked
me concerning all that I had seen and learnt of her dead father.
What was he like? Was he tall, and great, and noble as she imagined
him? What was the colour of his hair? How old did I think he was?
And did I suppose he had suffered much in that dreadful ice prison
in the far north?

To all of which I answered as best I could, with my very slight
knowledge of the facts she was so much interested in. O, if I had
only known who that passenger was that lay dead in the captain's
room! I could perhaps have discovered more about him before the
ship went down.

As we walked side by side across the white moorland, my companion
looked again and again at the glittering ring on her finger.

"I am glad," I said, "that I happened to bring the ring away with
me."

She sighed.

"I'd rather you had brought my mother's picture. That would have
been more to me than anything else."

"Alas!" I said. "But I did not know then that it was the picture of
your mother, Thora; and I thought it would be wrong to take it from
his hand. For it was perhaps the only thing he had to look upon in
those weary long days in the ice prison that could remind him of
his happier times. I think it must have been the last thing his
eyes rested upon while his life lingered."

"Maybe you're right, Halcro," said she; "but I'd like to have seen
the picture.

"Tell me," she continued, "d'ye know where my mother's grave is?"

"Yes, well do I know it, and I'll take you to it some day when the
snow is away."

We walked along silently after this, and parted at the gate of Crua
Breck farm.

A few days after Bailie Duke's preliminary examination of
witnesses, the procurator fiscal--the official by whom such
inquiries are conducted in Scotland on behalf of the Crown--arrived
from Kirkwall. The case had already been made clear in preparation
for him, and he had little else to do than take the evidence
formally and arrange it in legal order.

The matter became somewhat involved with the action against the
smugglers, for it transpired that Tom Kinlay had, after telling his
father of the affair at the inn, been sent by Carver to spy on
Colin Lothian, and to watch the cliffs and give an alarm in case
the revenue authorities had determined to institute a plan of
attack from the land. The evidence against him was too strong to
admit of a doubt as to the ultimate issue of the examination, and a
single day's inquiry was sufficient to establish the cas