the air was, it haunted the ear even of this professional
vocalist all the evening; but perhaps that was because he was looking
forward to a coming occasion on which he would have to sing the ballad;
and well he knew that however numerous his audience might be--though he
might be standing before all the Rosses and Frasers, the Gordons and
Munroes, the Mackays and Mackenzies of the county--well he knew that he
would be singing--that he intended to sing--to an audience of one only.
And which would she like to have emphasized the more--the pathetic and
hopeless outlook of the lady in the tower, or the proud state and
ceremony of the earl himself as he used to "come sounding through the
toun"? Well, he would practise a little, and ascertain what he could do
with it--on some occasion when he found himself alone away up in the
hills, with a silence around him unbroken save for the hushed whisper of
the birch-leaves and the distant, low murmur of the Geinig falls.

CHAPTER XI.

THE PHANTOM STAG.

But if he were so anxious about how he should sing (for his audience of
one only) that old Scotch ballad, he was not acting very wisely, or else
he had a sublime confidence in the soundness of his chest; for on his
host's offering him another day's stalking, he cheerfully accepted the
same; and that notwithstanding they had now fallen upon a period of
extremely rough, cold, and wet weather. Was this another piece of
bravado, then--undertaken to produce a favorable impression in a
certain quarter--or had the hunter's hunger really got hold of him? On
the evening before the appointed raid, even the foresters looked glum;
the western hills were ominous and angry, and the wind that came howling
down the strath seemed to foretell a storm. But he was not to be
daunted; he said he would give up only when Roderick assured him that
the expedition was quite impracticable and useless.

"I hear you are going after the deer to-morrow," said the pretty Miss
Georgie Lestrange to him, in the drawing-room after dinner, while Lady
Sybil was performing her famous fantasia "The Voices of the Moonlight,"
to which nobody listened but her own admiring self. "And I was told all
about that custom of making the stalker a little present on his setting
out, for good-luck. It was Honnor Cunyngham who did that for you last
time, and I think it should be my turn to-morrow morning."

"Oh, thank you!" said he; but "Thank you for nothing!" he said in his