"Can't you give a lot of them away, and do what I said—go back to the time before you bargained for them?"

"You don't understand how difficult it is to go back."

"But you are back—in Scotland."

"You're right. Now's my one chance to return to my youth and ideals. Bright little Princess, thank you for polishing up the dulled surface of my soul."

"It's only the surface that needs polishing," said I. "The inside part is shining, even when the outside looks dim. But I'm afraid you're making fun of me?"

"I was never more in earnest. I'm crossing more than one border with you to-day."

"Borders you like crossing?"

"Great heavens, yes!"

"I'm glad of that," said I, in a self-satisfied way, "for then you won't miss Mrs. West so much."

"Miss Mrs. West? Good Lord, I'd forgotten her!"

"That's very ungrateful and horrid of you, then," I scolded him, "because you and she were friends, and she knows how to be perfectly charming."

"Yes. She knows how."

"She knows just what to do and say."

"Yes. She's an agreeable—and experienced—woman."

"And if it hadn't been for me, she'd be sitting by you now."

"I have little doubt of that."

"And you would have been happy."

"I should have been contented. There's a big difference between contentment and happiness. You can't have learned it, yet."

"Oh, can't I! It's all the difference between—between—well, the difference between this borderland seen on a dark day and seen on a day of sunshine. It's the same landscape, but it doesn't look the same to the eyes or give the same feelings to the heart. The dark-day feelings would be calm and quietly pleasant; the sunshine feelings would be full of thrills and heartbeats—as to-day."

"By Jove, you've hit it!" he exclaimed as if to please me by agreeing. "Full of thrills and heartbeats—as to-day."

"Then you do feel the romance of everything in this sunshine?" I asked, quick to drag a "yes" from him while he was in the mood.

"I should say I did. And I'm not ashamed, with you to back me up. But I've a sneaking idea I should have been ashamed of it with Mrs. West. And I shouldn't have felt the thrills, only a calm, peaceful pleasure, as in the gray days—contentment. I shouldn't have known what I was missing, perhaps. I should have respected myself for outgrowing my enthusiasms. But—in my best moments, Princess, I've pitied people more for not knowing what they miss in life than for missing the things."

"Yes," I answered, "because it's better to know there are beautiful things, and to want them in vain, than grub along without knowing of their existence. But all that's got nothing to do with Mrs. West."

"Perhaps not. Yet it has something to do with me. No need to bother about the connection."

"I won't bother about anything!" I laughed in my joy of life and of motoring, which seemed one and indivisible just then. "I'm wrapped up in the magic golden web that Sir Walter Scott and Burns have woven round every mile of this land across the border—our land, yours and mine."

"So am I, caught in the web, lost in it—to my own surprise." He laughed as he drove, his eyes alert and young. "Burns, by the way, came to Ecclefechan, where we're arriving now. He had an uproarious time, and wrote verses to the Lass of Ecclefechan, which shows the place must have been a good deal livelier then than now. Or else, which is as likely, he had a faculty of squeezing the juice out of the driest, most unpromising fruit—the same faculty you have."

"Perhaps the fruit dried up later," I suggested. "Burns died soon after Carlyle was born, didn't he? And maybe people began to be primmer when they were forgetting his influence."

"No. Those of us Scots who were meant to be dour were always dour," Sir. S argued, "since the days of John Knox, and long before. It was partly climate—partly persecution. Both agreed with our constitutions. But look, here's the little house where one of the greatest geniuses who ever saw the light in Scotland first opened his eyes. I dare say he didn't get much light—but he spent most of his life in giving it to other people, out of his own gloom. Wouldn't Burns have been interested, passing that house (as he must have, in the 'uproarious time' at Ecclefechan), if his prophetic soul had said, 'Here, in this little dwelling as humble as your own birthplace, will be born a man as great as you—and one of your keenest critics?'"

I didn't answer, because no answer was needed, and because we were both gazing hard at a small, whitewashed, double house made into one by an archway joining the two parts together. Coming from Gretna Green it was on our left in the midst of a gray and white village which would have looked commonplace if it had not been framed by an immense sky. It was as if this vast blue crystal case had been set down over Carlyle's birthplace to protect and mark it out from other places. There was the narrow, high-banked brook—"the gentle Kuhbach kindly gushing by" (as Sir S. quoted)—which had made music in Carlyle's childish ears, to echo through them all his life. Perhaps he paddled in the brook on hot summer days, just as little boys were paddling when our Gray Dragon suddenly broke the respectable silence of Ecclefechan; and I know that he must have seen stormy sun-rises and fiery sunsets reflected in it as in a mirror, just as the Lady of Shalott saw all the things that really mattered passing in her looking-glass.

It is the kind of village, and the gray or whitewashed houses with their red door-sills are the kind of houses, where you would say, rushing through in a motor, "Nothing can possibly happen." Yet Carlyle happened; and he was an event for the whole world, which now makes pilgrimages to his birthplace. And I think that when his memory travelled back to Ecclefechan, he would not have changed it for a garden of palaces and flowers and fountains. Even the wee bairns playing in the road where Carlyle played, knew why we stopped our car. They pointed out the Carlyle house, gazing at us in solemn pity because we were poor tourist-bodies, who couldna bide the rest of our lives in the best village in a' the wurlld.

For my part, I pitied them, because their feet were bare, whereas the poorest children in my native Carlisle have wonderfully nice shoes, bound in brass. But all the Scot—and perhaps the crofter—rose in Sir S. when I mourned over the little dusty feet. "Do you think they go barefoot because they've no shoes?" he asked. "You're wrong. You don't know your own country-folk yet. They've as good shoes as those Carlisle kids, and better, maybe. It's because they don't like the feel of the shoes when they play, and they're saving them for Sundays. I did the same myself. Not a pair of shoes did I have on my feet, except on the Sabbath day, till I was turned eleven."

It seemed to me that suddenly he had quite a Scotch burr in his voice, and I did like him for it!

An apple-cheeked old body opened the door. On it was a brass plate which would have told us, if we hadn't known already, that in this house Thomas Carlyle was born. Remembering what he grew to be and to mean in the big world, the three tiny rooms and the few simple relics were a thousand times more pathetic than if we'd been led through apartment after apartment of a palace, seeing christening cups and things under glass cases. They did not seem sad to me, only a little dour in a wholesome way, as porridge is dour compared to plum-cake. But the cemetery which we went to after we had seen the house made me want to cry. I didn't like to think that, coming back here to sleep after all those many years, Carlyle had not his wife to rest beside him. Lying with his ain folk behind grim iron railings couldn't have consoled him for her absence. This is the only graveyard I ever saw except the one where my father is buried; and somehow, it doesn't seem respectful to the dead to go and criticise their graves, unless you are their friends, bringing them flowers—pansies for thoughts and rosemary for remembrance. It's like walking into people's houses and opening their doors to look at them in bed when they're asleep, and can't resent your intrusion, though they would hate it if they knew. I said this to Sir S., and he partly agreed with me on principle; but he warned me that there are cemeteries I must visit in Scotland unless I want to miss the last volumes of several interesting human documents. I don't know exactly what a human document is; still, I suppose I shall go to the graveyards for the sake of finding out what he means.

He spoke as if I were likely to go to these places with him, and said that he would enjoy showing me Carlyle's house in Chelsea, which is "more full of the man's heart and soul than Ecclefechan is." But, of course, he said this without stopping to think. He will go back to America and forget the forlorn little princess he happened to rescue from a neighbouring dragon. Yet never mind, I shan't be forlorn after this! I shall have my mother, and mothers are more important to princesses than the most glittering knights. I shall, of course, travel about with her wherever she goes, so I can never be lonely or sad. I ought to be even more impatient than I am for the day to come when she is due in Edinburgh, and I can surprise her there: but I suppose, having lived without her so long, it is difficult to realize that I'm actually to see her at last. However, I think of her every minute—or perhaps every other minute; and I haven't fully realized until to-day how much there is for which I have to thank her: the gayety and hopefulness she must have kept in her heart, and handed down to me. Without gayety and hopefulness neither of us would have dared or cared to run away from Hillard House.

I think, far-fetched as it seems, it was seeing Carlyle's birthplace, and feeling the influence of his parents upon him, which made me understand. Great genius as he was, I wonder if he might not have been even greater if his mother or father had taught him that it was right to be happy and wrong to be sad? Sir S. says that Jenny his wife could have taught him all that, if he had chosen to learn; but he was grown up then, and so it was too late. The sunshine must be in your blood when you are a child, and then no shadows can ever quite darken the gold—or at least, that is the thought which has come into my mind to-day.

It was the right thing to turn southward off the Glasgow highway after Ecclefechan, to go to Annan and see the place where Carlyle got his schooling. The Gray Dragon, travelling slowly (for it, or "her," as Sir S. and Vedder always say), came to the end of the journey in a few minutes; but when Carlyle walked along that pleasant shadowy road, carrying his school books, he must have had plenty of time for day-dreams. Now and then he could have seen the Solway gleaming, and I can imagine how the beautiful, winding river must have given that grave, wise boy thoughts of the great river of life, running to and from eternity. We passed close to Hoddam Hill, where—Sir S. and Mrs. James told me—the Carlyle family lived for a while when Thomas was grown up, he translating German romances, and his brother working on the farm.

At Annan, looking at the statue of Carlyle's friend, Edward Irving, in the broad High Street, we came back to the subject of Doctor James, and I heard for the first time the real truth at the bottom of the bad gossip.

We had got down from the car to look at the statue, and read what it said on the pedestal. We were not thinking at first about the doctor, but only of Edward Irving, and Sir S. was saying to Mrs. James how Annan was only one of many towns where statues are put up to the memory of men once misunderstood and cruelly persecuted in the very place where they are afterward honoured. It seems that Edward Irving (who loved Mrs. Carlyle when she was Jenny Welsh) had to come back to his native town to be tried for heresy by the presbytery, after a brilliant career in London as a fashionable preacher and founder of a new faith. All the theologians of Scotland and crowds of other people (Sir S. says all true Scots are theologians at heart) came pouring into Annan by coach and chaise on the great day of the trial; and in spite of Irving's passionate appeal, he was found guilty by a unanimous vote.

Talking of the trial, and of the preacher's death the next year, took Mrs. James's mind to the subject which is never farther away than at the back of her head. She found a likeness between Edward Irving's fate and her husband's. "Richard was born in Carlisle and loved the place, but they believed evil of him and persecuted him," she said. "Some day he will come back and make Carlisle proud of her son. That's what I expect. That's what I live for." And she gazed up at the statue of Irving the preacher with quite the look of a prophetess in her eyes.

I was afraid that Sir S. would think her mad; but he seemed interested, as before, and asked if she had in her mind any particular kind of success her husband might be working to obtain. Was there something, apart from his profession, and the unfinished volume of history, which had occupied the thoughts of Doctor James in old days?

The little woman answered this question almost reluctantly, and I soon guessed why. There was a serum which the doctor had been trying to perfect. It was to be used instead of chloroform or ether, for people with weak hearts, or when for other reasons anaesthetics were dangerous. A patient in peril of death had begged Doctor James to try it upon him. The doctor had consented. The patient had died, and though it was not really because of the serum, but because the man couldn't possibly have lived in any case, the doctor's enemies had blamed him. "That was what broke his heart," Mrs. James explained, still staring at the statue with wide-open eyes, to keep the tears from falling. "That is why he died to the world which misjudged him."

"And do you think, if he can perfect this serum, he will come back?" asked Sir Somerled.

"When, not 'if.' But I always knew it would take a long time, because unless some rich person or people had faith and helped him, he would have to get together a good deal of money for a laboratory before he could make a great success or a great name. And he went away almost without a penny."

"I see," said Sir S., thoughtfully. "Well, such faith as yours is enough to inspire a man with courage to push the stone of Sisyphus to the top of the hill. And it deserves a high reward. I hope the reward may come, and that I may see the day. Now, we must go on, for this afternoon won't last as long as I could wish."

He helped Mrs. James to her place with extra kindness, almost tenderness, tucking behind her back the gray silk-covered air-cushion which she says makes her feel she is leaning against a nice pudding.

Neither of us had asked Sir S. what we were to see next, for we trusted him to choose; but when we were ready to leave Annan and go back to the high road, he said that the thought of Galloway was haunting him. "We can spin on to Glasgow by way of Moffat and see a lot of interesting places; or we can turn west from Carlyle country, for a run through Crockett country," he explained. "Which, shall it be?"

I was ashamed to confess that I didn't know why he called Galloway "Crockett country"; but Mrs. James saw my sheepish look, and excused me. "The child has had no novels to read later than Scott."

"Crockett has done for Galloway what Scott did for Tweedside," said Sir S. "It's his country. He has made it live. When I give this girl the promised present of Carlyle and Shakespeare, I must add Crockett. That is, as she reminded me"—and he smiled—"if Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald allows Ian of that ilk to lay gifts at her daughter's feet."

"Oh, she'll permit Barrie to accept books," said Mrs. James, with her pretty primness. "How the child will love the 'Raiders,' and the 'Men of the Moss Hags.' Yes, certainly she ought to see 'gray Galloway.'"

"Galloway be it, then," said Sir S., looking pleased. "But it won't be gray at this time of year. It will be purple and gold and emerald, and silvered with rivers running between flowery banks. And it will smell sweet as a Scotsman's paradise, with bog myrtle and peat."

"I too have often wanted to see Galloway," said Mrs. James, "even before I read the Crockett books; for the doctor devoted a particularly interesting chapter to its history. I remember well, the ancient name was most romantic: Gallgaidhel, for the country of the stranger Gaels. That was the heading he gave his chapter, and I fear I did not know what 'stranger Gaels' meant until I read it. The Celtic Gaels who lived there used to be called Atecott Picts; and though they were very independent and wild, and the Romans didn't govern them long, they accepted the Northumbrians as their overlords—oh, it must have been in the seventh century, I think. And two hundred years later they made common cause with the Vikings: so the other Gaels, who would have nothing to do with the foreigners, scornfully named the men of Galloway 'stranger Gaels.'"

"It was just jealousy, then!" said I. "Because the people of Galloway were so broad-minded and hospitable, and ahead of their times. It's the right country for strangers to visit first——"

"But we're not strangers," Sir S. cut me short. "You and I, Barrie, are coming into our own. To-night for the first time you'll sleep in your ain countree, under the 'heather moon.'"

"It ought to be a wonderful place, for our first night of the heather moon," I said, half shutting my eyes—"a mysterious, beautiful, lucky place, to remember always. What shall it be? Have you decided on what is appropriate?"

"I'd thought of Dumfries," he said. "But it doesn't answer that description, and though it's in Galloway, it concerns Burns and is out of Crockett land. Still——"

"Sweetheart Abbey!" Mrs. James exclaimed rapturously. "It should be at Sweetheart Abbey that Barrie dreams her first Scottish dreams."

The knight laughed rather bitterly for some reason. "Are Scottish dreams different from other dreams?"

"Perhaps," said Mrs. James, "they are the dreams that come true."



VI

It is days later, it seems a long time ago that I wrote of our plan to spend the first night in Scotland at Sweetheart Abbey—a long time since the night itself; for I have lived more in these few days than in all my life before.

Soon we are to reach Edinburgh. Monday is the day when my mother will begin acting there in her new play. I shall see her. It is to be the Great Day of all, the day to which all the others have been leading up, and I ought to be perfectly happy. So I am! Still, there's one little heavy spot in my heart. All the yeast of happiness won't make it light. The beginning of the new means the end of the old. The trip will be over—for me; though the Knight and the Gray Dragon will go on and have hundreds of adventures without me. They will be my knight and my dragon no longer. Perhaps I shall never see them again.

Before our days together slip away into the background of my mind (it seems as if they never could!) I want to write down things about them to keep and read when I am old.

First of all, there was Ruthwell Cross.

We went there from Annan; and as we flew along in the car over a good white road, we could see across widening waters the mountains of the English Lake country floating like a mirage along the southern sky, Skiddaw with its twin peaks higher and bluer than the rest. How I love the names of the Cumberland places and mountains! I made Sir S. say Helvellyn and Blencathra and Glaramara over very slowly, just for the music in my ears. And when his voice says a thing it sounds particularly well. I like to hear it roll out such a word as Northumberland, for instance. The way he says it makes you think of thunder on great moorlands, or a rush of wild Scotsmen over the border. But the Celtic names he speaks most lovingly, most softly, so that they ring on your ear for a long time after they are spoken, like an echo of fairy bells.

I did not mean to write all this about him and his voice when I began. There is so much else to say. Yet, somehow, I keep running back to him in my thoughts, especially now the trip is nearly over. And while I still cling to the subject, I have found out that he can sing as well as paint. But the singing belongs to Sweetheart Abbey; and Ruthwell Cross came before.

Mrs. James and Sir S. excited my interest in Galloway by telling me bits from the "Raiders," then stopping in exciting places to talk of something else. And somehow Galloway does seem a country where almost anything might happen—big, sensational, historic things. There was nothing gray to see except glimpses of the Solway, where the sea poured in its resistless tide; and that was the gray of polished silver. I had an impression of high hills, blunt in shape yet strangely dignified, and wide-spreading moors which sent out exquisite smells like lovely unseen messengers to meet us, as the car seemed to break through crystal walls of wind. Here and there were piles of pansy-brown peat, ready for burning. Children with heads wrapped in scarlet flame ran out of cottages to stare at us. Sir S. actually admired their red hair. He exclaimed suddenly, "By Jove, it's worth crossing the ocean to see that glorious stuff again! It's the hair of Circe." I don't know when anything has made me feel so much like a kitten that purrs over a dish of cream. For you know the hair he loved was just my colour, not a bit less scarlet. What would Grandma say?

It rained once—sharp rain like thin daggers of glass stabbing our faces as the car dashed through—and the wet road looked like a shining silver ribbon flung down anyhow on purple velvet. The purple velvet was heather, and I never saw any before we started on our trip, except a little sad, tame heather in the garden of Hillard House—heather moulting like a bird in a cage, with all the spirit of the moors gone out of it. But this Galloway heather was real heather, the heather of poetry; and I knew that by and by I was going to see the heather moon rise over it. The very thought brought a thrill—and I was glad, as I had it, that Mrs. West was somewhere else in her own car. She does so damp you, somehow, in your high moments, and make you feel too young for anybody to care for your crude little thrills or take them seriously.

When the rain stopped, it left a thin white mist floating over the heather, until the sun broke out and the deep purple was lit to crimson, like a running fire.

I'm not quite sure if all this happened before Ruthwell Church (called Rivvel by the people near), but in my memory it is part of the same picture, of that first day in Galloway.

I know we skimmed through a little place called Cummer-trees, and then Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the "sights of the world." He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.

We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a history as intricate as its own strange carvings.

In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing beforehand.

The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation, and nobody knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic inscriptions meant. Nobody cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest of all, the rudiments of the language which—as Sir S. expressed it—"Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected"; because they had to make their words, as well as group them together—which is all that lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate; but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitchell Kemble puzzled out—a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak; and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at Vercelli, near Milan. But it was written by the Northumbrian bard Caedmon, in a poem called "The Dream of the Holy Rood."

No wonder Sir S. wished to see Ruthwell Cross. There's nothing else of the kind, he thinks, so splendid anywhere.

Even then my first wonderful day in Scotland wasn't over, for we had time to see Caerlaverock Castle, which, according to Sir S., is another of the best things on earth. I suppose, in old days, when the world was small because it was difficult to travel great distances, it didn't seem odd to find magnificent runic crosses, and castles, and historic blacksmiths' shops, and houses of geniuses all standing cheek by jowl within a step of each other. They had to be like that, or nobody from the next county would ever have seen them: but now, especially to a person who has seen nothing except in dreams, it is startling, almost incredible.

Caerlaverock, Mrs. James said, was probably Scott's Ellangowan in "Guy Mannering"; so I shall read "Guy Mannering" as soon as I settle down to live with my mother. We couldn't help getting a little mixed up with Scott even here, at the gate of the Crockett country; and there were traces of Burns too, because of our being near already to Dumfries, where he lived for years and finally died. But the idea Sir S. had set his heart upon was for us to come back to Dumfries after we had seen Galloway and had run up to Burns's birthplace at Ayr. It would make each part of the trip more "concrete," he said.

Whether or no the stronghold of the Maxwells was Ellangowan, it was in any case the key to southwest Scotland, and in looking at the place it is easy to understand why. A great red-gold Key it was when we saw it, red-gold in the western sunlight in a hollow near the river; such red and gold colour as the old sandstone had, in contrast with the green of lichen and green of waving grass, I wouldn't have believed in, if I'd seen it in a picture. I should have said, "The artist who painted that ruined castle put on the colours he would like to see, not those he did see." But I should have misjudged him, because the colours were real.

Once there was a double moat all round the vast, triangular castle, and still there's water in one of them. You would have thought the Maxwell ladies had thrown their rubies and diamonds into it one wild day when they were escaping from enemies, and that the jewels had lain ever since at the bottom of the moat unnoticed, though the sunlight found out and treacherously tried to tell the secret. Think of Ptolemy writing about Caerlaverock, and calling it Carbantorigun! I'm glad we haven't to call it that now, or I should always have to say it—as one goes on saying "you" to a person whose name one hasn't caught.

Even if Caerlaverock were in hideous surroundings, it would be magnificent: but the river Solway is its silver foreground, and Lochar Moss is its mysterious background; so it is perfect in beauty as in strength, and if only no such hateful things as cannons had been invented, it would not now be a ruin. Although it lies so low, it was built to resist everything but gunpowder: for how could the Maxwells dream that all their beautiful arrangements for pouring down molten lead and boiling oil would be useless against a new foe?

Edward I took the castle in 1300, but Bruce got it back thirteen years later; and there was much fighting and tossing back of the Key from one hand to the other even before the great siege when the Earl of Essex punished Lord Herries for defending Queen Mary. Still, the walls stood bravely, and after the Essex affair they were made stronger than ever—so strong and so splendid it must have seemed as if Caerlaverock need never capitulate again to any enemy. But no sooner had the Maxwells finished a lovely new facade, the best they'd ever had, with carved window and door caps of the latest fashion, than Colonel Home came along with his grim Covenanters and blew up everything with his horrid cannons. I can't help disliking him, for the Maxwells seem to have been the most fascinating people. One Lord Maxwell of the seventeenth century, who was Roman Catholic when it wasn't safe to be Roman Catholic, used to disguise himself as a beggar, and play the fiddle in the market-place of Dumfries as a signal to tell the faithful of his own religion where and when they might come to Mass. They understood according to certain tunes agreed upon, which was easy, as they had only three meeting-places. A nice old man in the castle told us these stories and showed us the exquisite courtyard where Burns came one day when he was seventeen and cut on a stone in the wall the initials R. B. in a triangle, like a masonic sign, which suggests the wedge shape of the castle.

Sir S. knew all about this carving, and said that Americans had offered two thousand pounds for the stone. But the Duchess of Norfolk, who is mistress of Caerlaverock in her own right, turned up her nose, metaphorically speaking, at the offer. "I bid ye fair:" is the motto that goes with the crest over the huge gateway between two towers, and the rumour is that the Americans, in bidding for the stone of the initials, quoted this motto; but their aptness did them no good. In one of those towers Murdoch, the blind Duke of Albany, was imprisoned for seven years by James I before he was executed at Stirling; and they say that in the green hollow where the great red ruin glows he can be seen walking in the moonlight on the anniversary of his beheading.

One of my favourite stories in history is about Lord Nithsdale and his brave, clever wife who saved him on the eve of his execution by dressing him in her clothes and letting him walk calmly out of the Tower of London in her place. Think of being able to do such a thing for a man you loved! He was one of the Lords Nithsdale who came from Caerlaverock; and not far away, at Terregles House, is a portrait of that Countess of Nithsdale, with the cloak which her husband wore when he escaped. They have a Prayer Book, too, of Queen Mary's in that house, for she gave it to Lord Herries, who sheltered her in her flight after the battle at Langside, eighty miles away. But we didn't see these things. It was the old man at the castle who told us of them, because they are still in the keeping of the Maxwell family, of which he is very proud.

We hurried quickly through Dumfries, not to see or think of the Burns associations there until we should come back; but at Lincluden Abbey, close by, we were forced to think of him—although, as far as our trip was concerned, he wasn't born. At Lincluden, where he loved to come, walking out from Dumfries (as he must have walked to Caerlaverock to cut his initials) he saw the Vision. And Lincluden is so sweet a place that my thoughts of it, mingling very humbly with the great poet's thoughts, will lie together in my memory as pressed flowers lie between the pages of a book.

The road which leads from Dumfries to Lincluden seems like a quiet prelude to a lovely burst of music, so gentle and pretty it is. Then suddenly you come to the promontory stitched on to the mainland with great silver stitches of rivers, the Cluden and the Nith; and there are old earthworks, fallen into ruin, which guard the Abbey as the skeletons of watch-dogs might lie guarding a dead master. There's a mound, too, by the side of the ruined church, and it is called a Mote, which means something desperately interesting and historic, and there's a Peel-tower in ruin. Indeed, all is in ruin at Lincluden Abbey; but that makes it the sweeter and sadder. And as we came, the red of the crumbling sandstone burned in the fire of sunset like a funeral pyre heaped with roses. The melancholy, crowding trees and the delicate groups of little bushes were like mourners coming with their children to look on at the great burning.

We went into the church to see the tomb of Margaret Countess of Douglas, who was a daughter of King Robert the Third; and somehow the mutilations of the effigy made it more beautiful, causing you to see as in a blurred picture the thousand events of troublous times which had passed over the figure, leaving it through all peacefully asleep. A daughter of a king, with the Douglas Heart to guard her, she would be too noble in her stony slumber to show that she minded losing her features and a few other trifling accessories which might spoil the looks of less important women.

When we came out, high in the sunset glory gleamed a silver sickle, reaping roses. It was the heather moon, and I cried out to Sir S. as I saw it, "Wish—wish! Your first sight of the heather moon, and over our right shoulders for luck! Whatever we wish must come true!"

I was so excited that I seized his hand; and he was too polite to give it back to me like a thing he didn't want. So he held it firmly in his while we both looked up to the sky, silently making our wishes. My wish was to be that my mother might love me; but I stopped and thought, "What is the good of making such a wish, when I've only one, and I'm sure to get that one without the heather moon, as mothers all love their children." This caution was very "canny" and proved my Scottish blood, I couldn't help thinking, as I paused in order to select the most appropriate wish for the heather moon to grant.

Several ideas presented themselves with a bow: a wish to be happy: but that wasn't "concrete" enough, as Sir S. would say. A wish to be very rich and able to do anything in the world I might like to do; but being rich sounds so fat and uninteresting—or else bald-headed; for nearly all the photographs in picture papers of desperately rich people are one or the other, or both. At last I began to be nervous, for if Sir S. or Mrs. James (who was close by) should speak before I'd given my wish to the new moon, she'd be unable to grant it, even with the best intentions. That is a well-known fact in connection with wishing by the moon. I have it on the authority of both Mrs. Muir and Heppie. Being in a hurry, I grew confused, and so could think of nothing more important than to wish for my knight never to forget me in future, wherever he may be. And just as I'd finished, he said, "Well? What did you wish?"

Of course I couldn't tell him such a wish as that; but, luckily, you must never let anybody know what you've wished by a moon or a star, if you want the wish to come true.

I explained this to Sir S., and he said, as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter, for he hadn't wished after all. "Oh, what a waste of the heather moon!" I cried, for it really seemed too bad. But he answered that the only thing he particularly wished for just then was a thing which wasn't fair to wish, on account of the 'other party concerned.' I laughed, and said if he had wished to wish, he had wished, in spite of himself, and the heather moon had heard; because that's the business of any well-trained new moon, and the heather moon is the best-trained of the year. "'The other party concerned' must just take the risk," I said. "And very likely 'twill be the best thing for him, her, or it in the end."

"I daren't hope that," said he, looking up at the silver sickle as earnestly as if we weren't talking nonsense.

"Don't you think the heather moon knows best?" I reproached him. But he did not answer, and only hummed under his breath, as we walked to the waiting car:

"How far, how far to Gretna? It's years and years away— And coach-and-four shall nevermore Fling dust across the day."

All the way along the shadowy, switchback road from Dumfries going to Sweetheart Abbey (I like to write the name, it is so pretty and old-fashioned) we had glimpses of the moon scattering silver through the tree branches as she fell down the west. I thought the soft white curve like a baby's arm, rounded at the elbow; and it waved us good-night over the heather-clad mound of Criffel, as a baby might wave over the fat shoulder of a big nurse dressed in purple. It is cheek of Criffel to call itself a mountain, and of course it wouldn't dare to if there were other real mountains within twenty-five miles.

When I made this remark Mrs. James asked me where, in my sequestered life, I had got hold of such an unladylike word as "cheek," but I told her I must have been born knowing it, as there was never a time in my memory when I didn't. Also Mr. Douglas had used it several times in Carlisle Castle.

"Haven't you forgotten him yet?" asked Sir S.

"It would be silly to forget, and have to make his acquaintance over again at Edinburgh," I said. "He asked me particularly to think of him during our trip whenever I should see the Douglas Heart. Now I have just seen it at Lincluden."

"Douglas Heart indeed! Douglas cheek!" I heard Sir S. mutter.

There is one part of that road between Dumfries and Sweetheart Abbey I shall never forget: the view from Whinny Hill—a sudden view springing from behind trees, as if a green curtain had been pulled back from a picture. In this picture there were the silver Nith, and purple Criffel of course (which always tries to get itself noticed wherever you turn), a great forty-foot monument put up to commemorate Waterloo; and again the red triangle of Caerlaverock glowing on the green shore of the Solway Firth.

I suppose the people who were shy of seeming sentimental insisted on calling Sweetheart Abbey New Abbey. I can imagine Sir S. voting for the change, because I fancy that he would endure torture rather than be thought sentimental. He describes a place or a thing or a person glowingly, then hurries to cap his description with a few joking or even ironical words, lest he should be suspected of romance or enthusiasm.

The village is called New Abbey too, so it is safe to mention that to the driest person. It was just beginning to be evening, an evening softly gray as doves' wings folding down, when our Dragon sidled toward an inn it saw, quite a nice little inn, where Sir S. announced that we would stop the night. Before going in, however, he took us to look at a queer bas-relief built into the wall of a whitewashed cottage on the left side of the road. It showed three ladies industriously rowing a boat across the ferry—pious dames who brought all the stones from Caerlaverock, on the other side of the Solway, to build the Abbey.

"Rock of the Lark" is a delightful name, but Sweetheart Abbey is prettier, and the reason of the name is the prettiest part. Only I wish that the devoted Devorgilla who built the Abbey of Dolce Cor to be a big sacred box for the heart of her husband had had a worthier object of worship than the king, John Balliol. All the history I have ever read makes him out to be a weak and cowardly and rather treacherous person; but, as Sir S. said, "Mirabeau judged by the people and Mirabeau judged by his friends were two men"; and I suppose John must have put himself out to be charming to Devorgilla, or she wouldn't have wandered about with his heart in an ebony box inlaid with silver, and insisted on having it on the table in front of her when she ate her dinner. That was one way of keeping her husband's heart during her whole lifetime—and even after death, for of course she had it buried with her. It must have been glad of a little rest by that time, the poor heart, for it had so much travelling to do. I suppose it even went as far as Oxford when Devorgilla founded Balliol College.

The last shaft of the sun was turned off the rose-coloured ruin and the secluded valley where the cross-shaped Abbey hides from the world; and the moon was gone, too, swept away like a tiny boat on a wave of sunset. Still, it was full daylight, and Sir S. announced that he had a plan. This plan was for us to go (as soon as we'd seen our rooms, which he had engaged by telegram) and get permission to enter the Abbey by twilight, when no one else was there.

The little gray inn of the town looked no bigger than a good-sized private house, but it was the very first hotel of my life, and I regarded it as an Epoch, with a capital E. That point of view was upheld later by the heavenly scones and honey they gave us—heather honey, gold as the heather moon. And we had cool, clean rooms, suitable for the dreaming of sweet dreams. My dreams there seemed very important.

The great Somerled can of course get anything he wants to ask for if he chooses to reveal himself—anyhow, in Scotland; because already I am beginning to learn that even the smallest or humblest Scottish peasant knows all that's worth knowing, not only of the past but of the present, and has heard of all the celebrities. Maybe there might be miniature places in England, America, Germany, or France where the poor and uneducated would know nothing of Somerled the painter and millionaire. But in Scotland, apparently, though there are many poor, there are no uneducated persons. Those to whom his being a painter would mean nothing would be interested in his money. Those who didn't care for his millions of dollars would have read about his painting: and all would value him because he belongs to Scotland.

As soon as our luggage was in our rooms and dinner ordered, Sir Somerled inquired if we were ready for the Abbey; but Mrs. James mildly asked if we would mind going without her. She had begun to realize that she was tired, and would like to rest. She could go by herself to the Abbey early in the morning before starting time. I felt that I ought to mind more than I did, but I couldn't help liking to be with Sir S. alone. It seemed like the night of our first meeting; for some one had always been with us, more or less, ever since. It was only a short stroll through the village, not enough to call a walk. A dear little lady who lives in a nice cottage close to the ruin opened the iron gate, but she did not go in with us, because it was time for her supper. She had a photograph done from one of the great Somerled's most famous pictures, and if he had been a long she could not have been more polite.

At first, the inside of the shell-like Abbey with the beautiful name was a disappointment. The green grass was encumbered with tasteless graves and flat modern stones which looked as if they had lain down there without permission.

We wandered about rather forlornly for a while, until we found Devorgilla's thirteenth-century tomb. Sir S. told me her history, and waked the sad old place to living interest. I seemed to see the ever-loving lady, followed by her chosen maidens carrying the heart in its ebony and silver box. And together we made up a theory, that of every event something reminiscent lingers on the spot where it happened. If only our eyes were different, we should be able, wherever we went, to see filmy, mysterious pictures painted on air—fadeless, moving photographs of all the people and all the deeds which have made up the world's history.

This set us talking of our own pictures, which we are leaving behind us as we go through life; and I couldn't help thinking how he and I, in accordance with this idea, will for ever and ever go on being "married" at Gretna Green. I laughed at the thought, and he asked me why, so I told him.

"When you're marrying your real wife, years from now maybe, and have forgotten my existence, that scene will still be enacting itself," I said, "not only on the films the photograph men took, but on air films. Doesn't it frighten you?" I asked.

"Doesn't it frighten you?" he echoed. "Because you will marry. I never shall."

"How do you know?" I catechized him.

"If I can't have the wife I want, I'll have none."

"Perhaps you can have the one you want if you ask her nicely."

"I don't intend to ask. I'm not the right one for her."

"You might let her decide that!" I nobly said, for Mrs. West may be the woman. "I do hope, if men ever love me, they'll tell me so."

"No fear! They will." He laughed more loudly than I have heard him laugh.

"But the right one mayn't, if he thinks as you do."

"He won't. He'll be thinking only of himself. But look here, my girl, be sure you do take the right one when you marry; for if in my opinion you're likely to make a big mistake when the time comes, I may be tempted to put a spoke in the fellow's wheel."

"Please do!" I laughed.

"You think I'm joking," he said, watching me in a way he has, between narrowed lids, his eyes almost black in the twilight. "And so I am to a certain extent. Yet I might forbid the banns, perhaps—if I chose."

"But how?"

"Haven't you any idea?"

"Not half a one."

"Then I won't tell. It would only worry you—for nothing. Marry in peace, when your Prince comes, and I'll send you my blessing—from far away."

"I don't like to think of your being far away," I said. "Let's not talk of it. For you are my only friend—except Mrs. James. And you're so different."

"I thank Heaven!" he said. "And I thank her for wanting a rest. Good as she is, three would be a crowd in Sweetheart Abbey."

Speaking of her made me think of the time. We had promised Mrs. James to go back in half an hour for dinner! Already more than half an hour had slipped away as we made our air-film photographs to haunt Sweetheart Abbey with all its other ghosts.

The twilight was changing to a light more mysterious, and as we looked at each other through the opal haze I felt strangely that we were changing too. It was as if our realities were less real than the shadow pictures which were to live on here together forever—as if our bodies, which would go away and separate, to live different lives far away from one another, would not be us any more.

I could not have imagined so wonderful a light as that which illuminated the great rose-window and filled the vast broken shell of the Abbey. It was as if the day had been poured out of a cup, and night was being slowly poured in—the dove-gray night of dreams. It was pale, yet not bright like the light of dawn. It was more like a light glimmering over a sheet of water, a light made of the water itself. Almost I expected to see the Heart rise up in the ebony and silver box, and the box opening.

"You look like a young seeress," my Knight said. "What is it that you see with your great eyes gazing through the dusk?"

"I see—a heart," I answered. "I think I see a heart."

"That is very intelligent of you," he said, in a changed tone. "Come, child, it's time I took you home."

"Is there the ghost of a heart floating here?" I asked, wishing to linger. But he took my hand and drew me toward the gate.

"To me," he said dryly, "it appears to be a real heart—almost too real for comfort."

We walked back to the inn, and he was uninterestingly commonplace all the way. He talked about dinner, and buying petrol for the car, and told me dull facts about tiresome things called carburettors. It would have been a horrid anticlimax, spoiling all the romance of Sweetheart Abbey, if he had not changed later on. But he did change. There was a little piano in the sitting-room they gave us, and Mrs. James began drumming out a few Scotch airs, warbling the words in a high, thin voice rather like that of an intelligent insect. There was one tune I knew, and I couldn't resist joining in. At the end Sir S. applauded.

"What a pity her grandmamma wouldn't let her take lessons, as I once ventured to suggest!" said Mrs. James. "She has a true ear, and a sweet voice wonderfully like her mother's, which I quite well remember. But Mrs. MacDonald had the idea that music lessons would lead to vanity. Don't you think, sir" (she often slips in a respectful "sir"), "that her voice would repay instruction?"

"I do," pronounced the great Somerled.

"I'm sure you sing," went on Mrs. James. "I flatter myself I can always tell by people's faces."

"Like Barrie, I never had lessons," he said. "But I suppose we Highlanders are born with music in our blood."

"Then you do sing?" she persisted.

"Only to please myself. Not that it does!"

"Will you sing to please us?"

"It wouldn't please you."

"Barrie, you ask."

"The Princess commands!" I said, not expecting him to humour my impudence, but he did, by going at once to the piano. It had lisped and stammered awkwardly for Mrs. James, but it obeyed him as if the keys were mesmerized. He played a prelude, and then sang "Annie Laurie," in a soft, mellow voice, so low that people outside the room could hardly have heard. It seemed as if there must really be an "Annie Laurie" in his life. Surely a man could not sing like that, and look like that in singing, unless he called up the face of some woman he loved. I wondered if he thought of Mrs. West, who is so very pretty, and rather like the description of "Annie Laurie." His eyes looked far away as he sang, through the wall—oh, yes, I'm sure they could see through the wall at that moment—perhaps as far as "Maxwellton Braes"; perhaps still farther, searching for Mrs. West wherever she might be.

I don't know how it would make one feel if such a man with such a voice looked into one's eyes and sang a song of love. I'm afraid it might make one rather foolish. But it was only at the wall that Sir S. stared until he began a very different song—the lament of a Highlander who would nevermore see his island home nor the love of his youth. It was a heart-breaking song; and though his voice was pitched so low it was almost like singing in a whisper, there was a strange, vibrating power in it, as there is in the strings of a violin touched but lightly by the bow. Sir S. transferred his attention from the wall to me as he sang this sad old ballad, and I could not look away, because there was the same compelling power in his eyes as in his voice. No doubt it was only of the song he thought, not of me at all, really; yet I could not shake off the haunting impression of the look, and it made me dream of him all night. I saw him standing beside me in the strange, pale twilight of Sweetheart Abbey. And in his hand was a box of ebony, inlaid with silver, which he held out. But when I took the box it was locked, and he had no key. "Only the key of the rainbow will open this box," he said. And then I woke up, feeling somehow as if the dream were of importance, and I must try to find out why.



VII

Next morning when I saw Sir S. I felt confused and vaguely ashamed, as if something had happened. But, of course, nothing had happened, nothing at all. I kept on reminding myself of that until I was at ease again. And his manner helped me to realize how silly I was, for almost he seemed to go out of his way to put on the commonplace air I had disliked. It was as if he wrapped himself up in a big, rough coat, smelling of tobacco smoke, and rather old and shabby, with the collar well turned up.

We started early, long before eight, and Mrs. James remarked, while we were dressing—calling out from her room to mine through the open door—that there was more credit for Sir S. than for us in liking an early start. Many men as successful and flattered and rich as he, she said, would have grown luxurious in their tastes, and lazy. They would loathe getting up at six, and staying in tiny hotels, and fussing about to help their chauffeurs when anything went wrong with their cars. They would hate so much having to pack bags and look after themselves that they would find it impossible to enjoy travelling without a valet; but here was this man, used to every luxury, and able to command it, putting himself to trouble of all sorts and even enduring hardships as cheerfully as a "little bank clerk out for a holiday with his sister and aunt."

I agreed with her, and I suppose bank clerks are as interesting a class as any; but I'm glad Sir S. is not one. And it is more fun being his princess than his sister. Mrs. James may be his aunt if she likes. I wouldn't be it for all his millions.

He asked her again if she would like to try the front seat, but she politely refused, and then, with his rough-coat, turned-up-collar-air, he invited me to take it. Something deep down in me, like a little live creature whispering, told me to make him turn down that collar and throw off that rough coat. It did seem such a waste, to have him wearing his commonplace airs while we travelled through the most adorable country we had seen yet. I wanted him and me and the scenery all to be romantic together, and so I told him at last. "But if I'm determined to keep on the safe side of romance?" he said.

"If you've decided to be dull and disagreeable," I threatened, "I shan't give you the 'rainbow key' when I find it. I'll hand it over to somebody else."

"Will you?" he said. "Be sure the somebody else deserves it, then."

This annoyed me. Because I'm looking for the rainbow key for him, not somebody else. "At present I don't happen to know anybody else I'd care to give it to," I remarked.

"Ay," said he, "there's the rub. You know so few. But it will be different when the princess has a dozen knights all in the competition."

"Perhaps other knights won't notice that I'm a princess."

"Judging from what I've observed, I think they'll be quick to notice that."

"Well, it remains to be seen."

"Just so. It remains to be seen." His voice sounded sad or bored, so I tried to be tactful for once, like Mrs. West, and changed the subject.

This was the road which Carlyle thought the most beautiful in the kingdom. Going to Mainsriddle and Dalbeattie we skimmed through dark, haunted-looking woods, to sudden glimpses of far-down yellow sands and floating forms of mountains. The tide was running out or running in, veining the floor of gold with misty blue traceries, and making bright pools like bits of broken glass. The trees along our way were a procession of benevolent giants holding green umbrellas over our heads, because they mistook us for expected royalties; and on the smooth white surface of the road they had scattered shadows like torn black Spanish lace. Criffel followed us everywhere, trying jealously to keep us from noticing that the noble mountains of Cumberland were still watching us out of sight, across the Solway Firth. And indeed, Criffel, with some small brother hills he had to-day collected, like the hasty gathering of a clan, did manage to destroy the effect of distance so far as he and his brethren were concerned. He and all the rest, no matter how far off, pushed themselves into the foreground by means of their colour, so violent a purple that it struck at the eyes, and vibrated in the ears like rich wild notes of an organ rolling over the uplands of Scotland. Only the sands and the sea looked distant, though really they were near; and I worried about the groups of cattle gossiping so pleasantly together about their cuds and calves. They had a placid air of ignoring such large facts of life as incoming tides, and could never have read what happened to Mary and her cows on the sands of Dee, a resort only less fashionable in the cattle world than their own.

Lights on sky and sands, seen through the netting of tree branches, were like sweet bursts of laughter in the forests; and the glory of the heather was a wordless song in praise of Scotland. Yet in these flying Galloway landscapes there was an impression of the mystic and melancholy, which reminded Sir S. of "The Twilight of the Gods": strange purple rocks jutting out into water coldly bright as a sheet of mercury, and desolate islands remote and haunted as the place where Gunter and his sister lived in the opera. We seemed to be travelling through vast, lonely places, though it was but a part of Galloway, and all Scotland is but small—just large enough to give an eyeful of beauty always.

When we came to the sparkling granite town of Dalbeattie (a miniature Aberdeen, Sir S. called it) instead of going straight on toward Kirkcudbright we turned westward to see the great stronghold of the Black Douglases. It was no more than seven easy miles to Castle Douglas, a little modern town all laid out in rectangles. Sailing straight through, we came out on the edge of Carlingwark Loch, which rings a few green islets with silver; and taking a side road we were close to the river Dee. There, on a cushion of an island, only big enough to hold it, rose the great ruin of Thrieve Castle, the home of the proud and magnificent Douglases. Once boats must have carried the knights and ladies back and forth between the mainland and the fourteenth-century fastness of old Archibald the Grim. But now I saw a line of half-submerged stepping-stones, the only way of crossing in these days when there is no fighting or feasting at Thrieve, and no "tassel" dangling from the knoblike "hanging stone" over the great gate.

"Workers of high-handed outrage! Making King and people grieve, O the lawless Lords of Galloway! O the bloody towers of Thrieve!"

Sir S. quoted as we stared up at the giant keep, seventy feet high, with its tremendous walls. "They were a terrible power in the land, that family, at their greatest, when they lorded it over Galloway and Annandale, and owned Touraine and Longueville in France, and used to ride out with a retinue of a thousand picked horsemen."

"That nice soldier yesterday—Mr. Douglas at Carlisle—thinks they were a charming family," said I. "He has an old proverb something like this:

"So many, so good as of Douglases have been Of one surname in Scotland never yet was seen."

and he told me a great deal about the Douglas Heart."

"He would!" mumbled Sir S. "There were good hearts and bad hearts among them, but all were great hearts in the old days; anyhow, I'm not surprised that Crockett got inspiration from this place when he used to play here, coming over from Castle Douglas, where he was at school. He must have had his head buzzing with story plots when he'd climbed up inside the walls and crawled out to sit astride of the hanging stone. I'll warrant he saw Maclellan beheaded in the courtyard while Sir Patrick Gray, the King's messenger, supped with Douglas; and heard Mons Meg fire off the first granite cannon-ball, that shot away the hand of the Countess as she held a wine-glass up, drinking confusion to her enemies. No wonder little boy Crockett got absent-minded one day, when he dropped his watch instead of a pebble in wanting to test the time the stone would take to fall."

The next bit of Crockett-lore I heard was at Auchencairn in the deep, indented bay we'd reached by turning south for the coast again. There, it seemed, we were in the heart of Crockettland, for Hestan Island is the Rathan Island of the "Raiders." All round was sweet, welcoming country, low mountains and rippling meadows, where it seemed that the Douglas soldiers had laid their glittering helmets down in long straight ranks on a carpet of cloth o' gold. Over these fields of garnered wheat came a breeze from the sea, with a tang of salt like a tonic mixture, and there was a murmurous sound on the air, a message from the tide.

There were hundreds of historic things to see, in every direction, if we had had time for all: traces of the Attecott Picts; Pict forts and tombs, castles of the Middle Ages; robber caves; Convenanters' monuments; and at Balcarry, near Auchencairn, the landing-place of the smuggler Yawkins, who was Scott's "Dirk Hatteraick." But we had only five days for everything before the Great Day—which will be coming so soon now. From Auchencairn we turned inland to a rolling country where the Gray Dragon would be down one hill and halfway up another before he knew what had happened. At Dundrennan—"Hill of the Thorn Bushes"—he had his first mishap; but after the surprise of thinking a bomb had exploded, I was glad he'd seized just that opportunity of bursting a tire, because it gave us more time for the Abbey than we should have given ourselves.

While the chauffeur made the dragon's toilet, patching up a fat white foot as he might have doctored the pad of an elephant, we wandered about, and finally decided to lunch in a secluded corner of the twelfth-century ruins.

Mrs. James and I set out our picnic-table, a folding thing that Sir S. carries in the car, and we counted on having the place to ourselves. Tourists though we are, we scorn other tourists. But it seems incredible that such as they can scorn us. We talked about Queen Mary and of her last meal within those walls, and it felt sacrilegious to laugh and joke where she had been so sad. We pictured her, young and beautiful, taking leave of the loyal men who had begged her in vain not to trust Elizabeth; and we could fancy the town turning out to see her vessel set sail—a very different town it would have been then from the charming little place it is to-day, with its low white cottages half covered with flowers, the spotless walls as clean as damask tablecloths, and all so gay and bright to the eye that grim Dundrennan Abbey in its midst is like a skull fallen in a rose-garden.

"Ah," sighed Mrs. James, shaking her head, with a jam puff in her hand, "if the Queen had listened to Maxwell she might have lived in safety to be an old woman!"

"True, she might have kept her head," Sir S. agreed, comfortably cutting himself a piece of plum cake; "but if she'd taken Maxwell's advice, instead of sailing from Port Mary, never to see Scotland again, wouldn't the whole civilized world miss its best-loved heroine of romance? No other woman since history began has so captured the hearts of men, and made herself so adored through the centuries, in spite of all her faults, or because of them. Mary Stuart and Napoleon Bonaparte are the two figures in history of whom no one ever tires of talking or reading."

"Still, we must be sad at Dundrennan, where her last night in Scotland was spent," Mrs. James mildly persisted, having eaten her puff while Sir S. argued. "I wonder if Michael Scott the magician, who lived here (he comes into the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," you know), had prophetic visions of Queen Mary and her fate? I should think so, for he had the secret of all sorts of spells. The people of the neighbourhood believed that he'd locked up the plague in an underground room of the Abbey, and for years they dared not excavate for fear the demon should leap out and ravage the country. They used to think they could hear a rustling——"

At that instant we heard one ourselves; a distinct rustling fell upon our ears, and made us turn round with a start. The plague we feared was tourists; but if it had been Michael Scott's demon, with a scarlet body and a green head, I should have liked it better than Mrs. West's pale purple coat and motoring bonnet. I don't know how Sir S. felt about the surprise, but that was my feeling, though I was glad to see her brother. I find him the nicest thing about Mrs. West.

"Who would have thought of running against you?" she exclaimed, as Sir S. jumped up from the table and shook hands as cordially as if there had never been that mysterious row. "We've come from Port Mary, where Basil sentimentalized over the stone Queen Mary stood on to get into her ship. We haven't the patience to make our notes before luncheon! We're so hungry, and there's such a lot to write about King David—do you think he built the Abbey, or was it Fergus, Lord of Galloway?—and all this architecture which interests Basil even when he's starving! We've brought our own sandwiches—we won't bother you——"

Of course Sir S. and Mrs. James both protested that having them was a pleasure, not a bother. As for me, I remembered that little girls should be seen and not heard, so I said nothing, and ate the nicest cake for fear Mrs. West might get it. Sir S. gave his place at the table and his folding-chair to Mrs. West, and finished his luncheon, standing up, with Mr. Norman. After all, Mrs. West didn't seem to be hungry. She ate scarcely anything, and when Sir S. asked her to have some ice-cold white wine from the refrigerator basket, she said with a soft, sad smile, "'I drink to thee only with mine eyes.'" Then, suddenly, hers filled with tears, so they were liquid enough for a good long drink! She looked down again quickly, with a blush which gave her complexion a peach-like bloom; and Sir S. made haste to question Mr. Norman about the hired car. But I could see that he was embarrassed and distressed, and wondered more than ever what their quarrel was about. Sir S. wouldn't listen to me the first day, when I said it was my fault, and I oughtn't to go in his car. I'd almost forgotten that, it seemed so long ago; but I remembered when I saw the tears in her eyes, and heard the strained sound in his voice. Even Mr. Norman didn't look happy. Mrs. James was the only one not affected. She ate her luncheon with a good appetite, which the sorrows of neither Mrs. West nor Queen Mary could take away from her.

When we had finished, Mrs. West asked Sir S. in a gentle hesitating way if he would mind explaining to her the beautiful Gothic doorway at the south side of the church. It was such a chance to find a great authority on architecture, like him, upon the very spot, for she and Basil were so ignorant, they always feared to make mistakes in their notes. Sir S. went like a lamb led by a chain of roses, but apparently Mr. Norman didn't feel the same need of expert advice. He stopped with Mrs. James and me, and helped us clear the table. When we'd packed everything up, he offered to take the basket to the car; and, as the others hadn't come back, I went with him, carrying the folding-chairs, which were not much heavier than three feathers.

"Have you remembered my advice?" he inquired. "Have you begun to write?"

"Yes, a little," I said. "What about your book?"

He shrugged his shoulders, looking melancholy.

"Won't the plot come right?" I asked.

"No. Nothing comes right."

"What a pity!"

"Yes, it's a pity. But I can't help it."

"Can't Mrs. West help?"

"She's not in the mood. Not that it's all her fault. Probably it's just as much mine. We're getting on each other's nerves—and that's new to us. There won't be a book. There can't be a book as things are."

"Yet you're going on with your trip?"

"Oh, yes, we're going on with our trip. Aline wouldn't give that up."

"If it hadn't been for me," I said, "it would have been all right for you both. I feel a beast! I've spoiled everything."

"You're a witch, and you've bewitched us. Yes! That's what you have done."

"Thanks for your polite way of putting it," said I. "'Witch' is a nicer epithet than 'beast.' I wish—I almost wish—I'd never seen any of you!"

"I don't," said he. "And I don't believe Somerled does. To go back to the time when we didn't know that the witch-child existed would be going back from electricity to candles."

"You have a pretty way of poking fun at me," I laughed. "But I suppose you mean I've given you all a shock. Well, you'll soon be rid of me. Three days more, and the end! But I do wish I knew how to mend matters and make you and your sister happy again, at once."

"I could tell you how," he said quickly.

"Do, then! You've just time, if you hurry up before the others come."

He looked round, and there were Mrs. James and Mrs. West walking toward us with Sir S. They were very near.

He hesitated, and his face grew red. "Will you promise not to be angry?" he almost whispered.

"I promise! Tell me."

"If you want to make everything come right for everybody in a minute, you must turn your attention entirely to me."

"What good would that do?" I asked stupidly.

"It would do me all the good in the world, because, as I told you, you've bewitched me. It would do my sister good because—well, because she's particularly anxious for you to like me. And it would do Somerled good because—it might teach him his own mind—bring him to his senses."

"I don't understand one word you're talking about!" I broke out.

"It doesn't so much matter what you understand as what you do. Dear little Miss MacDonald, will you try and be very, very kind to me, for—everybody's sake?"

"Of course," said I. "But you must call me Barrie."

"Thank you! That's one step. Will you call me Basil?"

"If you like," I answered. "Basil and Barrie! Don't they sound nice together?"

Just then the others came up and heard what I said, which made me feel foolish, as they'd missed the first part. But Mrs. West beamed at me. I had been thinking that Basil Norman was the sort of man I should love to have for a brother, but Mrs. West as a sister I could not stand!

"Basil and Barrie look nice together too, don't they, Mr. Somerled?" she remarked.

"Very," said he dryly. And the next thing I knew was that she was sitting beside him on the front seat, and I was tucked in beside Mrs. James, with Basil Norman opposite. Their motor, it seemed, was not behaving well, and Aline was nervous, so Sir S. had suggested, as we were all going on to Ayr, that they should come with us for the rest of the day.

I felt rather dazed about everything, and I'm afraid made a hash of the scenery in my mind, until I had calmed down. I remember that we swept through Kirkcudbright, which was named for St. Cuthbert because his bones were once in the church. They were taking them on somewhere else, but I don't know why. Basil told us all about it; but it sounded so odd to hear him talking instructively of saints and Covenanters and martyrs, and "the torch of religion being first lighted in Galloway," after he had been begging me in a very different voice to "be nice to him," that it muddled up my intelligence. I liked the town because it was pretty, with graceful spires and lovely, ivied ruins; but I didn't care much about the saints, or even about the last Lord Selkirk, for whom they put up a Celtic cross in the Kirkcudbright market place; and I couldn't be bothered pronouncing Kirkcudbright correctly. Of course it's done in the last way you think it possibly could be, like all other Scottish names! I brightened up a little at the story of Paul Jones at St. Mary's Isle, because pirates are always nice, and he was classic. Besides, it was amusing of him to fail to kidnap Lord Selkirk and steal a silver teapot instead. To please Benjamin Franklin he gave the teapot back, so he didn't get much out of that adventure!

I remember too that there were hills on the way to Gatehouse of Fleet, hills which turned their backs and reared on their hind legs as we saw them in the distance; but always they knelt meekly in front of the Gray Dragon, as if he beat them to their knees. They were not so accommodating to the hired car which followed. Something was the matter with its internal economy. It grunted and groaned and emitted evil-smelling fumes because it couldn't digest its petrol. Basil named the creature Old Blunderbore, but said he would not dare to call it so before its chauffeur-owner, who glared behind his goggles when it was blamed for anything.

Gatehouse of Fleet looked, according to Basil, like places in Holland, because sailing ships were apparently moving through fields, and masts mixing themselves up with tree branches. Suddenly we had plunged into Scott country, sandwiched in with Crockett, for Gatehouse is the "Kippletingan" of "Guy Mannering." There was a sweet, sad smell of the sea; and I heard Mrs. West ask Sir S. if it didn't remind him of "that last night on the ship, when we told each other things?"

About this time, I think it must have been, we began to see so many old castles dotted about the landscape that at last we almost ceased to notice them. It must have been nice living in one of those box-like fortress castles in old days, when all your friends had them too; so jolly and self-contained. And, as a matter of course, when you built one you had a few dungeons put in, just as one has plenty of bathrooms now in a big house. If you were of a dramatic turn of mind, you placed your dungeons mostly under your dining-hall, so you could hear the starving prisoners groan while you feasted comfortably. We passed several dear little towns, too, which I should like to have for toys, to keep in boxes when not playing with them. On most of the houses were charming chimney-pots of different colours, exactly like immense chessmen, set out ready for a game. All the men in these towns looked almost ill with intelligence. Most of the girls were very pretty, with little coquettish features contradicted by saintly expressions, and even the dogs appeared well educated and intellectual.

At Newton-Stewart a change came over the houses, but not the people or animals. I felt that the smallest child would know more about books than I did; and there was hardly a nondescript face to be seen. All could be classified in historic Scottish types. But the whitewashed, thatched cottages in the suburbs would have looked Irish if they had not been too preternaturally clean. In the streets of Newton-Stewart there was not so much as a stray stick or bit of paper. It looked to me a deeply religious place, and Basil said perhaps it was trying to be worthy of St. Ninian, who first brought Christianity to Scotland. He was a native of the Solway shore, but went to Rome, where they liked him very much and made him a bishop. Then he felt impelled to convert his own people, so he sailed from France and landed at the island of Whithorn, which is now an excursion place from Newton-Stewart. That sounds irreverent, but, after all, an excursion is only a kind of pilgrimage; and even if people are catching fish or eating them, they can be pleased to be at the one place in Scotland where Christianity has gone on without interruption by Vikings or others for fifteen hundred years.

Then, besides, Newton-Stewart has a monument of Samuel Rutherford to live up to. And they ought to have one of his namesake, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, who has done so much for Galloway.

It was in honour of his "Raiders" that we took the longest way to Ayr. Some of the best things in that book happened near Loch Trool, so we wanted to see Loch Trool. Bruce was there too; but this was a Crockett tour. We should have gone perhaps, even if the run had been dull, for it's only thirteen miles from Newton-Stewart, paradise of fishermen, to the hidden lake; but the thirteen miles turned out to be a panorama of beauty. Sir S. was surprised by its loveliness, though he knew by heart Burns's poem, "The Banks of the Cree." We did not come at once to the river; but from House o' Hill (delicious name!) we plunged into a wild, forgotten paradise. The road lay under an arbour of trees like an emerald tunnel, with a break here and there in the green wall to show a blue shimmer of mountains and hills in the distance. We seemed to have slipped into the hole leading to fairyland and pulled the hole in after us; but I knew I was not going to enjoy getting there as much as if my gray bonnet and coat had been on the front seat instead of Mrs. West's purple beauties. It was suddenly that we came into sight and sound of the river, and so deep was the stillness that we might have strayed into the haunt of a sleeping nymph. Nothing moved but the rushing brown water, and there was no sound, when we stopped to listen, but its joyous song and the humming of bees in bracken and heather.

Basil can "make believe" more easily and less stiffly than Sir S., because he is an author, and used to stringing whimsies together. He and I "pretended" that the bees were a fairy band, playing to a hidden audience in a theatre roofed with the silver sheen of arching ferns. Wafts of perfume came to us, cooled in woodsy dells, or warmed on sunshiny banks of flowers; but not a soul could be seen anywhere, nor a house. We knew that this was an inhabited world only by the wires stretched across the river for the sending of letters and parcels.

Sunset-time had not nearly come yet, but already a silver slit was torn in the blue of the sky; and for the second time the heather moon was smiling its bright semicircular smile, as if to say, "Make the most of me, Barrie, your time is short!" Yet how could I make the most of her when I could see only my knight's back, with a purple shoulder as close to his as possible, and the heather moon was ours?

Suddenly Basil said, "Oh, there's your heather moon! I thought of you yesterday after it rose until it set, and wondered what you were doing. I do believe this is different from other moons. Don't you see, young as it is, how it has power to change the yellow of the sunlight, seeming to alloy it with silver?"

I did see, but thought I must have fancied the effect, until he saw it too. (We often think and see and say the same things, which is nice, but not so exciting as the society of a man who thinks different things and makes you argue.) The silver pouring down from that small crescent seemed to sift through the strong golden light in a separate and distinct radiance. It shimmered on the sea of waving hills and billowing mountains that opened out before us, as if sprinkling a glitter of sequins over the vivid green and amber and purple. Wherever there was shadow this pale glimmer painted it with ethereal colours, like the backs of rainbow fish moving under water. I might have jumped out of the car and found the rainbow key, but nobody wanted it now!

"Just as that young, young moon has power to shine through the strong afternoon sunlight, so a girl may all in a moment throw her influence over a group of people older and more experienced than herself," said Basil, smiling at me, and then at Mrs. James, as if he didn't mind her hearing the flowery compliment.

"I don't know any such girl in real life," said I; "but you might work her up for your book."

"I shall have to put her in, if the book's to be written," said he.

By and by we came to the lake, or, rather, far above it; and Sir S. stopped the car to let us get out and look down. The water was a clear green with glints of purple, as if beds of heather grew underneath. There were jagged, bare rocks, and rocks whose shoulders were half covered as if with torn coats of faded brocade, dim silver of lichen, and pale pink of wild flowers. I hoped that Sir S. might join me for a look at the heather moon lying deep in the lake like a broken bracelet, but he didn't come. He looked at me very kindly from a distance, not coldly, yet not warmly, and he stayed with Mrs. West.

It was Basil who told me about Robert Bruce and his men hiding here, and rolling huge stones on the heads of the English soldiers who marched along the bank of the lake in search of the "outlaws." It seemed as if nothing terrible could have happened in so sweet a wilderness; but that was not the only horror. There were other wild deeds in history, and in the story of the "Raiders," memories of hunts for Covenanters, and great killings. But now all is peace, and I should have thought Loch Trool forgotten by the world if, in a dell of birch, rowan, hazel trees, and great pines like green umbrellas, I had not spied a roof.

Sir S. said it was the roof of Lord Galloway's shooting-lodge, loved by its owner because it was "out of tourist zone." So much the worse for tourists! So much the better for Lord Galloway!

I should hate to think of the road to Loch Trool smoking with motor dust. Of course our own Gray Dragon's pure dust is a different matter!

As we ran out of Crockett land into Ayrshire we came into Wallace land; for every foot of Scotland is taken up twice over by something or somebody wonderful. There isn't an inch left for new history-makers. If we could see those "emanations" Sir S. talks of—those ghost pictures—as far as the eye could reach we should see men marching, splendid men and women, too, who have made the world shine with their deeds, processions coming from every direction, out of the dim beginning of things up to the present day.

After the wildness of Loch Trool we had a country of plenteousness and peace. Basil said it was like a Surrey set down by the sea, so I suppose Surrey has big trees and flowery hedges and rolling downs, purple with heather. But surely no heather can be as purple as Scottish heather?

The sands of Girvan seemed to float like a golden scarf on the blue sea, and the town looked a romantic, mediaeval place till we shot into it. Then we were disillusioned as to its age; but Ailsa Craig was noble in the distance, and a few members of the gull colony had flapped over to give town dwellers and visitors a sad serenade. "Gulls, golfers, and geologists all love Girvan," Basil said.

"Have you put that down in your notebook?" I inquired.

"Not in those words. But I jotted down something about this town in advance from authorities I've looked up. I generally keep two books going: one in which I put the things I want to see, and ideas for plots sometimes tangled up with a sort of diary; and another book of thoughts about places I have already seen—thoughts I can weave into a story in one way or another."

"You haven't once written in either of your books to-day!" I accused him.

"No. I told you I'd given up note-taking for the present. I'm all at sea. But just now it's a beautiful if not very calm sea."

"When it quiets down you'll begin again," I consoled him. "How I should love to see a real, live author's notebook! It would be so useful to know how you manage to—to——"

"Record impressions," Mrs. James helped me out.

Smiling, Basil took from a breast-pocket a small green morocco volume with a pencil slipped into a loop. Compared to Mrs. West's pretty book, his was a shabby thing; but it smelt of good cigarettes.

"I'm afraid this will disillusion you," he said, "if you expect something interesting. I simply make notes of things I want to see, or jot down thoughts to recall pictures to my mind. Reading over one's notebook is like glancing over a lot of kodak films. Sometimes one sticks in a lot of nonsense."

I opened the little volume, and ran my eyes down the short pages. "Carlisle, Saturday, August Something or Other. Notes for Scotch Tour," I read aloud. "Story of honeymoon. English hero—American girl. Aline wants her Canadian. I see her American. Dispute. Must decide soon. Reading up Galloway makes me want to go there. Aline says rush straight on to Ayr, and save time. Hate saving time! Worst economy. More time you spend, more you have. Must go along coast of Ayr, anyhow. Once lined with strongholds of great families. See Dunure, Crossaguel, and deuced lot of others.

"Keats visited Burns's birthplace. Wrote sonnet there. Look this up.

"Burns sought out, along banks of Ayr, places where Wallace was supposed to have hidden. Good stuff this. Wallace fought all over the place here. At Irvine, one of his earliest exploits. Kindled big fire, neighbouring village. When English soldiers marched forth to put fire out, jumped on them and killed the lot. Stuffed bodies into dungeon of castle at Irvine. Called 'Wallace Larder' after that. Nasty larders people had in those days. Read up account Douglas Larder. Compare the two. See which worse. Why not call Barns of Ayr Wallace Oven? Read up Blind Harry for picturesque story Barns of Ayr. Far as I remember, English enticed all neighbouring Scots to powwow of some sort. Wallace expected; delay on way. Scots executed on some pretext. When Wallace turned up, niece warned him. He routed up few followers, set fire to barns and burnt English, who were celebrating triumph over Wallace and his men. When get to Ayr look this up further.... Word 'Whig' comes first from Ayr. Wonder why? Look up. Also get Burns glossary. Dialect difficult. Aline won't read Burns. Fear she's going to fail in this book. Thinks only of one thing. But no matter. Courage, mon brave!

"Sunday. Had batch bad notices of last book from America. Aline gone to bed with headache as usual after bad reviews. Says we must economize. She'll forget when we start and want best suites of rooms with baths everywhere. I know that book was good. Hang notices! Understand so well what Job meant when said, 'Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!' He wanted to criticise it. Each new boil would suggest scathing epithet.

"Monday. Everything changed. Old plot exploded in thousand pieces. Mustn't be honeymoon couple. Heroine radiant young girl, eighteen, hair red as Circe's, eyes of new-born angel, comes like bombshell into hero's life. Not good simile, bombshell. Query, hero. Would she fall in love with man of B. N.'s type? I see another type more probable, but don't want that.

"August 4th. Fearful row. General upset. Don't see any book unless I write it alone. Aline says I can save situation for her. Would like only too well do what she wants, but difficult bring it off as things are. Chances in favour of other man. Temptation consent be cat's-paw. Is that fair to the lovely chestnut in the fire? Extra-ordinary that child like this can so upset us all. What is the electric attraction we can't resist? More than normal amount of radium, perhaps!"

"Well, why don't you laugh at the rattle of the dry bones?" asked Basil, as I read on, more and more puzzled.

"I haven't come to many funny things yet," said I, "except about Job. That was rather good, though I don't see how you weave such things into your books."

"Job—Job?" he repeated vaguely. Then a rush of blood went over his whole face, up to his forehead. His dreamy dark eyes looked suddenly anything but dreamy. "Good Heavens!" he gasped. "What have you got there?" and began to ransack all the pockets of his waistcoat and coat until he found the twin of the book he'd given me. "This is what I meant you to see," he said in a queer, ashamed voice.

I handed the first book back to him. He seized it and glanced from page to page, looking almost ill. By and by he came to something which seemed to scare him. As far as I could tell, it was farther toward the end than I had read.

"Would you mind showing me where you left off," he asked.

"It was where you were wondering whether your new heroine had swallowed radium or something," said I.

"Oh!" He looked relieved. "Well—I wouldn't have had you see that idiotic stuff for a good deal. But I told you, didn't I, that if the book went on I'd have to put you into it? There's a lot of silly rot there. Poetical license!"

"The thing that made the most impression on me was the part about the red hair," I said. "The description sounded so nice. Who was Circe, please? Was she Scottish? It's a name a Pictish princess might have had."

"The first Circe lived even before the Pictish princesses," Basil answered, quieting down, though he was still very flushed. "But she's had a good many descendants—one or two at least in each generation of women born in every country. Not that you—I mean the new heroine—will be one of them really."

"What did Circe do?" I hurried on.

"Do? She was an exceptionally attractive woman. She had a special kind of magnetism that nobody could resist. She amused herself by turning all the men she knew—there were quite a lot of them—into animals of different sorts."

"I think it would have been cleverer and more attractive of her if she had turned animals into men," said I.

"That's what my heroine can do," Basil explained. "She's a kind of miniature baby Circe, for her red hair and general get up, and her curious power of upsetting people and their plans from the first minute they see her. But—my heroine wouldn't and couldn't turn her victims into beasts. She makes them want to transform themselves into something very extra special in the way of manliness."

"Why do you call her your heroine with an emphasis?" I wanted to know. "Isn't she your sister's heroine, too?"

"No. My sister doesn't see her as a heroine for a novel. And that's why I say the book we started out to write won't materialize. No author can write a story he or she doesn't take a strong interest in."

"That's where my writing is easier," I said. "I just put down all the things exactly as they happen, and as I see and think about them. So there's no heroine—and no hero—and no story."

"Yes, that is simpler," he agreed. "That's the way the Great Author writes His book. Only all His characters are heroes and heroines in the stories of their own lives."

As we talked, the moon went down in the west. The sky was a pale lilac, like a great concave mirror reflecting the heather. Then it darkened to a deeper purple, and made my thoughts feel like pansies, as they blossomed in my mind. We fell into silence. But Mrs. James said afterward that was because we were hungry and didn't realize what was the matter with us. Perhaps she was right, but it didn't seem so prosaic at the time.