think it," said I; "for that might apply to suitors
at home in Inneraora as well as me."

M'Iver laughed at the sally, and "Well, well," said he, "we are not
going to be debating the chance of love on Leven-side, with days and
nights of slinking in the heather and the fern between us and our home."

Though this conversation of ours may seem singularly calm and out of all
harmony with our circumstances, it is so only on paper, for in fact it
took but a minute or two of our time as we walked down among those whins
that inspired me with the peaceful premonition of the coming years. We
were walking, the seven of us, not in a compact group, but scattered,
and at the whins when we rested we sat in ones and twos behind the
bushes, with eyes cast anxiously along the shore for sign of any craft
that might take us over.

What might seem odd to any one who does not know the shrinking mood of
men broken with a touch of disgrace in their breaking, was that for long
we studiously said nothing of the horrors we had left behind us. Five
men fleeing from a disastrous field and two new out of the clutches of
a conquering foe, we were dumb or discoursed of affairs very far removed
from the reflection that we were a clan at extremities.

But we could keep up this silence of shame no longer than our running:
when we sat among the whins on Leven-side, and took a breath and
scrutinised along the coast, for sign of food or ferry, we must be
talking of what we had left behind.

Gordon told the story with a pained, constrained, and halting utterance:
of the surprise of Auchinbrcac when he heard the point of war from Nevis
Glen, and could not believe that Montrose was so near at hand; of the
waver ing Lowland wings, the slaughter of the Campbell gentlemen.

"We were in a trap," said he, drawing with a stick on the smooth snow a
diagram of the situation. "We were between brae and water. I am no man
of war, and my heart swelled at the spectacle of the barons cut down
like nettles. And by the most foolish of tactics, surely, a good many of
our forces were on the other side of the loch."

"That was not Auchinbreac's doing, I'll warrant," said M'Iver; "he
would never have counselled a division so fatal."

"Perhaps not," said the cleric, drily; "but what if a general has only a
sort of savage army at his call? The gentry of your clan----"

"What about MacCailein?" I asked, wondering that there was no word of
the chief.

"Go on with your stor