THE CAMERONIANS.

A Novel.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF
'THE ROMANCE OF WAR,' 'OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH, ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.
1881.

[All Rights Reserved.]

TO
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE, ESQ.,
MY OLD FRIEND AND PUBLISHER,
I INSCRIBE THIS MILITARY STORY,
AS A TRIBUTE
OF
RESPECT AND ESTEEM.

PREFACE.

The old Scottish regiment from which the following story takes its title, and of which the hero is described as a member, is on the point of losing its identity, and after the July of this year will be united with the 90th Perthshire Light Infantry, as 'The Scottish Cameronian Rifles,' thus losing, of course, its scarlet uniform, colours, and facings—the royal yellow of Scotland, which, by a correspondence with Mr. Childers, in March last, the author was fortunate enough to secure (instead of buff) for all Scottish infantry, not laced with blue.

Of the merits of the new regimental system it is difficult to speculate as yet; but it will too probably create an endless confusion, and be long a source of regret to the entire army.

25, TAVISTOCK ROAD,
WESTBOURNE PARK.
May, 1881.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER

I. [EAGLESCRAIG]
II. [HEW'S LOVE-MAKING]
III. [FIRST IMPRESSIONS]
IV. [COVER-SHOOTING]
V. [HEW MAKES A VOW]
VI. [A REVELATION]
VII. [HEW'S 'MILD PLAY']
VIII. ['THE LOVE THAT TOOK AN EARLY ROOT']
IX. [MRS. GARTH ACTS A FRIENDLY PART]
X. [A CRISIS]
XI. [HEW MAKES MISCHIEF]
XII. [CECIL'S DEPARTURE]
XIII. [IN SHADOW LAND]
XIV. [LESLIE FOTHERINGHAME]
XV. [SEPARATED]
XVI. [ANNABELLE ERROLL]
XVII. [HOPES AND FEARS]
XVIII. [THE CAMERONIANS]
XIX. [THE PROGRESS OF EVENTS]
XX. [THE OLD STORY AGAIN]

THE CAMERONIANS.

CHAPTER I.
EAGLESCRAIG.

'Twenty-sixth Regiment,' said the old general, raising his voice, as he rustled the morning paper importantly, after taking it from the ebony reading-easel (attached to the arm of his large and comfortable velvet easy-chair), whereon Mr. Tunley, the butler, always laid the journals, after he had duly aired and cut them. 'Twenty-sixth Regiment,' he added, coughing and clearing his voice, 'a detachment of this distinguished corps, says the Ayr Observer, has recently arrived at the castle of Dumbarton, under the command of Lieutenants Cecil Falconer and Leslie Fotheringhame.'

'Well, there is nothing remarkable in that, uncle,' said one of his young lady listeners, who seemed chiefly intent upon her breakfast, and not much interested by the intelligence.

'My old regiment—my old regiment still,' said the old man, musingly. 'Gad, I'll have the senior—what's his name? Cecil Falconer—over here, for a few days' cover-shooting.'

'And why not the other too?' asked the young lady who had just spoken, laughingly; 'we might have an admirer each, Annabelle.'

But Miss Erroll, to whom the name of Fotheringhame seemed not unknown, coloured and did not reply.

'Both could not leave their men at the same time,' said the general.

'Then I hope the senior is a pleasant fellow—he whom you propose to bring, Sir Piers,' said Mr. Hew Montgomerie, of whom more anon.

'All the Cameronians were pleasant fellows in my time,' said the general, tartly, 'and I have no doubt they are so still. And remember, girls, that the smartest officers are usually selected for detachment duty,' he added.

Those remarks passed in the cosy and elegant morning-room of Eaglescraig, the mansion of Sir Piers Montgomerie, Bart., who—a retired general officer—was G.C.B. and G.C.S.I. and Colonel of the Cameronian Regiment, and Governor of the Castle of Dumbarton: and the party at breakfast consisted only of Sir Piers, his remote kinsman and heir, Hew Montgomerie, of the Indian Civil Service, home on a year's leave; his grandniece and orphan ward Mary, also a Montgomerie; her friend Annabelle Erroll—both very handsome girls—and an old lady who presided over the silver tea-urn and Wedgewood breakfast equipage, Mrs. Garth, Mary's governess and friend, the widow of an old captain of the Cameronians—five personages, with whom we hope to make the reader fully acquainted in time.

Sir Piers was verging now on his seventieth year, but he was fresher and more hale and hearty than many a man of fifty. His features were still handsome and regular, though lined and wrinkled; his eyes were keen as those of a hawk, and his figure, still wonderfully erect, was clad in a rich maroon-coloured robe-de-chambre, with yellow silk facings, cord, and tassels, and he was seated near the blazing winter fire, with his feet on a velvet stool, and encased in slippers of Mary's handiwork.

Generous by nature, yet hot-tempered and proud—-pride of birth had been a positive vice with him in early life—Sir Piers was a curious mixture of the testy old Indian general, accustomed to every luxury, including tyrannising over 'niggers,' with the country gentleman of the old school; and having a profound admiration for the service and everything pertaining thereto, like old Bismarck, he believed that every man should be a soldier and rejoice in being one.

In his latter years Sir Piers had not been with the Cameronians, but had seen a deal of service in India as a general officer, and, while slowly creeping up the list of his rank, had been appointed, in the usual courtesy of the army, full colonel of the old regiment in which he had been a subaltern and field-officer.

His hunting-days were well-nigh past now; yet, at a meet, all the field rejoiced to see the fine old man in his saddle, and with all his pride of bearing—for a wealthy parvenu, however honestly he had won his wealth, Sir Piers would have treated with chilling hauteur—he was never above conversing with some sturdy farmer of Kyle or Cunninghame, kindly and affably, on the price of stock, the fall of wheat, on breeding, fattening, or draining, and always winding up by some, often irrelevant, anecdote of his sporting experiences in India, or when he followed the drums of the Cameronians. Old as he was, he had never been known to shrink from a bullfinch, or be fished out of a brook; he was welcome in every homestead throughout the country-side, and the farmers' wives always assumed their brightest looks, brought forth their whitest tablecloths and the best contents of larder and pantry, in honour of the old Laird of Eaglescraig, when he came their way.

He was a Justice of the Peace and Commissioner of Supply for the County; he read the Field, of course, as what country gentleman does not? He studied the War Office Gazette regularly, as if he expected his own name to appear there, once weekly; he was simple in all his tastes and happy in all his surroundings, yet, for all that, there was a skeleton in his house and heart, known, perhaps, to himself alone.

He was a childless man now—childless by an act of his own—and the title and estates, which he inherited from a long line of ancestors, were eventually to pass from him to the heir of entail, whom he strove hard, but in vain, to like or admire.

The latter, Hew Caddish Montgomerie, was then about thirty years of age. He was not ungentlemanly either in manner or bearing; but his face, like his disposition, was very defective. His eyes were called grey, and seemed to be grey at times; yet, on closer inspection, it was but too apparent that those shifty and furtive orbs of his were of different colours, for one was a species of bilious green.

They were closely set on each side of a nose that strongly resembled a shoe-horn, and his mouth, which was both cruel and licentious in contour, was partly concealed, or altered in expression, by a luxuriant brown moustache. He had come home, we have said, on leave from the C.S., a sharp hand at cards and with a billiard-cue, deeply dipped in debt, and with the current reputation, among his set, of being 'a bad lot.' His mother, daughter of a Sudder judge, was one of the old English family of Caddish, a name which Hew was wont to affirm was a corruption of Cavendish; be that as it may, the corruption thereof, in some instances, suited his character amazingly well.

'This is rather unlike your usual proud exclusiveness, Sir Piers,' said he, after a pause.

'What? inviting this young officer to knock over a few birds?'

'Yes—without an introduction.'

'Introduction? None was needed in my time; the epaulettes were introduction enough everywhere. The service is certainly not what it was in my day, the special school of honour and politeness; but I'll do the right thing, for all that. Let me see, which is senior—Falconer or Fotheringhame. Tunley, hand me the "Army List." Thanks. It is Falconer. I have known what it is to be on detachment in such a dull hole as Dumbarton, killing time till the spring drills come on, so I'll invite the senior.'

'And how about the poor junior?' asked Miss Erroll, colouring slightly again.

'Well, even to gratify you, Annabelle, I cannot bring him,' said the general, laughing. 'I remember once, when we were in cantonments at Barrackpore——' Hew smiled as the general began thus; but they were spared the probably prosy reminiscence, for just then Sir Piers' faded features clouded suddenly, as he put down the 'Army List' and said, in a changed voice: 'Had my boy Piers lived, he might now have been at the head of the regiment—five-and-twenty years ago—five-and-twenty years! My God, how long—how time has rolled away!'

His eyes, as he thought this, rather than spoke it all aloud, were cast for a moment furtively—as if he was ashamed of exhibiting any sudden emotion—on the full-length portrait of a handsome young subaltern, in the uniform of the Cameronians, scarlet faced with yellow, massive gold epaulettes, and the silver sphinx on his belt-plate. It represented a spirited-looking young fellow with a proud and joyous expression of face, and a well-knit, well-set-up figure.

The shifty, parti-coloured eyes of Hew Montgomerie travelled for a moment in the same direction, and then he addressed himself to the grouse-pie, thinking the while that 'things were deucedly well ordered as they were, so far as he was concerned.' And then the meal proceeded somewhat silently, Mrs. Garth officiating over the cups, and Mr. Tunley, a paragon of old rubicund butlers, at the side-board, where the cold beef and grouse-pie were placed, among Indian jars and old silver race tankards.

Mary Montgomerie, the general's grand-niece and ward, and her chief friend and gossip, Annabelle Enroll, were both attractive and very handsome girls, each in her twentieth year, but different in their styles and complexions.

Of a good stature, and round, firm and graceful in form, Mary Montgomerie had well-defined eyebrows, eyes, and hair, all of the darkest brown; long lashes lent a great softness to her white-lidded eyes, and she had a quiet ease, elegance, and girlish innocence of manner; yet at times she was full of vivacity, born of the fact or knowledge that she had been, as an orphan, from her youth, much of a petted child, and reminded by many around her that she was the heiress of many a thousand and many an acre, provided that she wedded with the full approval of one who was not likely to be severe upon her—old Sir Piers, her grand-uncle and legal guardian; for she was the only daughter of his favourite younger brother—younger by several years.

As such she filled a void in his heart, and ever and anon the old man's eyes were wont to rest kindly, fondly, and admiringly upon her.

Her complexion was fair and creamy, her features regular and minute, yet they were hardly ever in repose, for every variety of expression, as thought inspired it, flitted over the ever-changing face.

Though less favoured by fortune, and even by nature, her friend Miss Erroll was nevertheless a charming girl of the blonde type, with grey-blue eyes and fair hair shot with gold, as it seemed, in the sunlight, soft, plentiful, and wavy as the darker tresses of Mary, and her eyebrows and their lashes were just a shade darker than her hair. In the tone and tenour of her ways she was less impulsive than Mary Montgomerie, who at times would come down the house stairs at a headlong rush, while Annabelle followed with calm step and slow, or would quietly seek a gate in the hunting-field, while Mary, with her horse's head uplifted by her light, unerring hand, cleared the nearest hedge at a flying leap, and with a laugh that rang like a merry silver bell.

Both girls were eminently graceful and full of charming manners and pretty winning words and ways; but the difference of their temperaments was indicated even by the style of their morning-dresses, for the robe of Annabelle was pale blue, as became the character of her beauty, while that of Mary was of warm maize colour, tied with fluttering scarlet ribbons, with rosettes of the same to match on her tiny slippers. The loose, wide, falling sleeves of this garment coquettishly showed her round white arm at times, from the taper wrist to the dimpled elbow, and then she would smile and hastily let them fall forward when she caught the quick, shifty eyes of Hew Montgomerie cast admiringly on her.

The fifth of our dramatis personæ, as yet, is Mrs. Griselda Garth, or, as she preferred to be called with the old Scoto-French courtesy, that is now passing away, 'Mrs. Captain Garth.' The widow of a Cameronian officer who had died on service in the East, a calm, subdued, and gentle, white-haired old lady, she had found now, for life, a quiet home at Eaglescraig, and had acted for more than twelve years as a species of tender mother to Mary; and thus, after her duties as a governess were past, she remained as her mentor, companion, and chaperon, honoured, loved, and trusted by Mary and old Sir Piers, who had been her husband's friend.

'If Mr. Falconer avails himself of my invitation, and I don't see very well how he can decline it,' said the latter, returning to his late idea, and viewing it somewhat in the light of a regimental order, 'the dog-cart can meet him at the Montgomerie Arms in Ardrossan; and you, Hew, will do me the favour to drive him here to Eaglescraig.'

'Yes; that will be in better taste than sending a servant,' added Mary.

'Excuse me, Sir Piers,' said Hew, almost sulkily, as his chronic jealousy already took the alarm; 'but I don't care for acting as charioteer to a total stranger.'

'As you please,' replied Sir Piers haughtily, as he always disliked to have his wishes thwarted; 'some one else will obey my orders, I have no doubt.'

Eaglescraig, in the Bailiwick of Cunninghame, we may describe as a magnificent modern villa, with plate-glass oriels, a pillared portico, a stately perron, and balustraded terrace, whereon the peacocks spread their plumes and strutted to and fro. It had been, somewhat incongruously we must admit, added to, or engrafted on, the tall, old, square baronial tower that for ages had been, from the lofty bluff known as the Eaglescraig, a landmark of the sea, and which started up gaunt and grim, with grated windows, corbelled battlements, and tourelles at the angles—a tower the pride of the general's heart as the cradle of his house, and the home of his ancestors, all unsuited though it was to modern usages, taste, and requirements—an edifice so massive and old, that Hardy Knute, when he dwelt in the adjacent castle of Glengarnock, may have shared in it the hospitality of that Sir Hew Montgomerie who fought at the battle of Largs, and whose coat-of-arms, three fleurs-de-lis, with three annulets quarterly, crested by a maiden holding a man's head, may still be seen above its northern door; and these Sir Piers had now reproduced upon everything else, from the carriage panels to the dogs' collars and the salt-spoons.

On one side the house of Eaglescraig commanded a view which, on a summer day, was a delightful one, when there was just breeze enough to swell the passing sails—the glorious Firth of Clyde, with the dark-blue peaks of Arran in the distance, widening out into the ocean, with ships homeward bound after many a tedious, rough, or prosperous voyage; others with their prows turned towards the far horizon, bearing with them, perhaps, expatriated Highland emigrants, their hearts filled with sorrow and regret, rather than with the thoughts of 'high emprise,' so necessary for an exile's success in the doubtful future.

Close in shore, below the beetling cliff, when the wind is from the land, may be seen the many coasting vessels and steamers plying to and fro, shooting clear, as if by magic, from many a rocky promontory and bluff, where, thick as gnats, the sea-birds wheel and scream; and in many a sheltered cove the boats, brown-tarred and clinker-built, moored or safely beached, for the people there are all hardy and thrifty fisher-folk.

But on the landward side the view was different, and there the eye could wander over the tolerably flat and very fertile acres of Sir Piers Montgomerie, wood, wold and pasture, the richest part, perhaps, of the rich dairy-farm producing land in a district of which, as the old rhyme says:

'Kyle for a man,
And Carrick for a coo;
Cunninghame for butter and cheese,
And Galloway for woo'.'

So the general's invitation to Lieutenant Cecil Falconer was written by Mary and despatched, to the great annoyance of Hew, and all in Eaglescraig knew that in another day or two the recipient thereof, who had accepted it, was coming.

Mary Montgomerie and her friend Annabelle Erroll were too much accustomed to society, and the gaiety of fashionable life, to feel even any girlish excitement at the prospect of a young sub being added to their present small circle at Eaglescraig; nevertheless, in the seclusion of their dressing-closet, it was voted and passed by them, nem. con., that the said addition would not be unacceptable; and, on lot being laughingly cast as to whom he should fall a victim, the prize was Mary's.

And after this they ceased to think upon the subject—certainly, at least, so far as the latter lady was concerned.

CHAPTER II.
HEW'S LOVE-MAKING.

During the few days that passed before the arrival of the expected guest at Eaglescraig, Hew was more than usually attentive to the general's wealthy ward; and one forenoon when they were idling in the long avenue, which led through the Dovecot Park down the woodland slope towards the highway, he resolved, if possible, to bring matters to a successful issue with her.

For fully a month past, since his appearance at Eaglescraig, Mary had been used to this love-making of his, apparently, as she treated him half coquettishly, and yet so 'chaffingly,' that—but for his extreme vanity, or obtuseness—he must have seen that he had no chance of success.

Mary valued his attentions at their real worth, and times there were when he eyed her gloomily—yea, angrily, for he trusted more in Sir Piers' influence, wishes, and authority, to bend her to his will, than to any merit of his own.

Thus his love-making was a curious combination of earnestness, banter, and sullenness; earnestness caused by the girl's great beauty, which he certainly valued, and her great wealth, which he valued much more, on one hand; and on the other, genuine dislike of India, with his own impecunious circumstances, and a knowledge of Sir Piers' wishes. The banter came at times, because he was really incapable of loving any girl truly; and the sullenness was born of his lack of success, with a chronic jealousy of every other man who addressed her.

On this forenoon in the Dovecot Park, Annabelle Erroll did not accompany them, so Hew proceeded to utilise the occasion.

Mary looked bewitchingly beautiful and piquante in her rich brown sealskin, a grey skirt and a coquettish black velvet hat with a scarlet feather. She kept her hands obstinately in her tiny muff; thus Hew had no pretence for capturing one of them in any way as a suggestive preliminary to something more, and could only walk by her side and utter his soft nothings from time to time, to which she listened, half amused and half bored the while, and not helping him in any way.

The winter day was clear and bright, and the keen gusty breeze that swept from the sea over Eaglescraig imparted a rosebud tint to Mary's usually pale cheeks that enhanced her beauty by adding a fresh light to her eyes. The gusts of wind whirled showers of yellow and brown leaves across the sward, and drifts of stormy clouds through the sky over land and Firth, yet Mary's spirits were a high pressure, and though but little sunshine lit the December landscape, she was full of merriment and the espièglerie that were natural to her.

The dovecot they were approaching, like most of the ancient edifices of that kind in Scotland, was built in the form of an enormous beehive, some twenty feet high, and full of columbaria for the pigeons, which were flying in clouds around it, or perched on the summit thereof. It was, in due conformity to an ancient act of the Scottish Parliament, placed in the very centre of the Montgomerie estate, so that the birds should not prey upon the corn of other proprietors; and the reason why so many of these antique dovecots in Scotland survive the mansions to which they belonged, is supposed to be an old superstition, that if the dovecot is destroyed, the lady of the land dies within the year.

Near that of Eaglescraig are two large yellow rings or circles strongly marked in the green-sward (like those on the hill of Craiganrarie), drawn by the sword of an evil Montgomerie, who had trafficked in Satanic influence, and thus had formed round him an orbit of protection, before summoning his sable majesty, and round which the latter had to keep running, so long as he was visible to mortal eyes.

'You do worry me, Hew,' said Mary, with something of a saucy laugh, 'and I have every mind to stand in the conjuror's circle and defy you to approach me.'

'Do you deem me, then, so distasteful, so odious, and such an incarnation of evil?'

'No; but seriously, what is the aim, the object of all this attention, Cousin Hew? for though the tie is a remote one certainly, I may call you cousin, I believe.'

'Do, dearest Mary.'

'Well?' she asked, curtly and impatiently.

'The aim and object, you say?'

'Yes, yes.'

'To marry you, of course; that is—that is, if you will have me, and please Sir Piers,' he replied, with perfect deliberation and more apparent coolness than he usually felt.

'I won't consult grand-uncle on that matter, Cousin Hew. Besides, now that I think of it, I don't want to marry.'

'Indeed! I thought marriage was the sole aim of every girl's existence.'

'In novels more than in real life, perhaps. Besides, marriage is only to be thought of when the man and the hour come.'

'It is the end of all anxieties,' urged Hew, who thought no doubt of his monetary ones.

'I have none to end; and with many girls it is only the beginning of a set of troubles which none of them expect. But let us drop this very funny conversation.'

'Why?'

'You surely would not seek a wife with half a heart, or none!'

'The half of your heart, Mary, is worth the whole of any other woman's!' replied Hew, with more warmth and gallantry than he had yet shown; but the provoking Mary only laughed, and as she drew near the dovecot, some of the pigeons, to whom her figure was familiar, and whom she was wont to bring food for, came wheeling and fluttering round her, and one, after nestling in her neck—a pretty sight—alighted on her left hand, and while she stroked and fed it with the right, Hew could not but remark that the snow-white pigeon was not whiter than her slender fingers.

'I would I were that pigeon,' said he, sentimentally.

'"Would I were a glove upon that hand!"—now don't be a goose and attempt to act Romeo, as I cannot be your Juliet,' said Mary, laughing outright; and now he began to eye her with his gloomiest expression in his parti-coloured orbs, while she caressed the bird, and sang, as if to it, part of Lady Anne Lindsay's song:

'"Why tarries my love? Ah, where does he roam?
My love is long absent from me.
Come hither, sweet dove, I'll write to my love,
And send him a letter by thee.

'"Her dove she did deck, she drew o'er his neck
A bell and a collar so gay;
She tied to his wing a scroll with a string,
Then kissed him and sent him away."'

Suiting the action to the word, she kissed the pigeon and tossed it from her with a merry ringing laugh, for she had ever a light glad heart, and was full of pretty, yet haughty and winsome ways.

Hew, in the vanity of his nature, could not see how hopeless it was for him to press his suit with a girl who never listened to him seriously, and who never tried, even in the least degree, to care for him; for there was something in Hew Caddish Montgomerie that made Mary totally indifferent to all he could urge, and so she felt neither regret for, nor gratitude to him: thus she could hear unmoved the avowal and proposal from his lips, which seldom fail to stir in one way or another the hearts of most women, and which, whoever utters them, are seldom or never forgotten.

'Let us be friends, Hew,' said she, in reply to another appeal; 'I do not love you—I cannot love you as you wish, and I dare not and would not marry where I did not love.'

Hew eyed her still more gloomily and almost revengefully, while she played with the spray of a wild-rose tree, till a little cry escaped her, as a thorn entered her delicate hand.

'Do permit me, Mary,' he urged, and tenderly enough he extracted the thorn, and bowing over her hand, pressed it to his lips; but Mary almost angrily snatched it away, just as the sound of wheels was heard, and there bowled up the winding avenue a dog-cart, the driver and the occupant of which must have seen, and no doubt misunderstood, the whole situation.

'Our new guest with his gun-case and portmanteaus,' said Hew, with much annoyance.

'Who?' asked Mary, still more annoyed, as she thought of what Hew had done.

'Have you forgotten?'

'Oh! you mean Mr. Cecil Falconer.'

'Yes, that fellow from Dumbarton. Now don't, please, run off to the house, Mary; we shall meet him and his military appetite betimes, no doubt, when the gong sounds for dinner.'

Mary had now an undefined sense of provocation, and in silence turned away towards the house, accompanied by Hew, who found his chance was gone for that day, and Mary never gave him another if it could be avoided.

Thus ere long he began to fear that until Sir Piers' demise, and the baronetcy and broad acres of Eaglescraig became his by succession, he might have to face the Indian C.S. again; and seek how to meet his debts by trying—as he had often done—his fortune at 'the board of green cloth.'

CHAPTER III.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

The sense of having borne a part in a scene—an event which is dreaded by well-bred folks—prevented Mary from making her appearance till dinner-time, when, after achieving a most effective toilette, she entered the lighted drawing-room.

Though almost totally unembarrassed by any memory of Hew's absurd love-making, she had nevertheless been provoked that the new guest should have been cognisant of his gallantry in the avenue. She could but hope that he had forgotten it, which was certainly not the case, and ere she had left her dressing-closet, she paused before the pier-glass to peep at her own sweet face and all her bravery, ere she swept away down the great staircase to the drawing-room, where already the general and their visitor were on the best of terms, laughing and, as Mrs. Garth phrased it, 'talking shop in full swing.'

'Yes, yes,' she heard Sir Piers saying, 'it was there at the storming of that hill-fort that the notable dispute took place between Douglas of "Ours" and Bruce of the Bengal Infantry, as to which was senior and who should lead the stormers; till Douglas, when the bullets, egad! were flying like hail down the breach, lowered his sword and said, "When a Bruce is to lead, a Douglas may be proud to follow; lead on, and I shall follow you!" He was shot down a minute after, and the next who was knocked over was your good-man, Mrs. Garth—poor John! Ah! my niece,' he interrupted himself, on seeing the suddenly arrested gaze of their guest. 'Mr. Falconer of "Ours," Mary—Miss Montgomerie.'

Mary gave him her hand and a smile of welcome, and was at once put at her ease, as Sir Piers resumed his anecdote, to which, though she had heard it a hundred times before, Mrs. Garth listened with rapt attention, as became an 'old campaigner,' while Annabelle Erroll, who seemed already to have discovered that she and Mr. Falconer had some friend or friends in common, was conversing away with more than her usual fluency and animation.

'Is she already smitten by our new sub?' thought Mary.

Falconer had certainly a striking face and striking figure, and both were well calculated to please a woman's eye. In plain but accurate evening costume, the funereal costume of festive civilisation, he seemed every inch a gentleman and a handsome fellow; calm, self-possessed, and in about his twenty-fifth year; soldier-like, perfectly well-bred, as it eventually proved, was well-read and a skilful musician.

His nose was somewhat aquiline; his eyes and close-shaven hair were, like Mary's, of the darkest brown, and his moustaches, as Annabelle afterwards whispered to her, were 'the perfection' of such appendages. He had a placid and perfectly assured manner, very different from Hew's alternate restlessness and insouciance; yet his eyes bespoke a latent fire of character and a spirit that was full of courage and energy; and now Hew, who had been preparing for the coming meal by having either sherry and bitters, or a hideous compound called a 'cocktail,' which he had taught the butler, Tunley, to make up, came lounging in, with scrutiny and gloom in his eyes, to complete the little circle grouped near the fire.

By nature suspicious and envious, he barely accorded their visitor a touch of his hand, and from that moment these two young men felt—they knew not why—an instinctive dislike of each other.

The dinner-gong cut short another anecdote of the general's, and recalled his thoughts from pig-sticking and Central India; he gave, with courtly old-fashioned politeness, his arm to Mrs. Garth; Mary took that of Cecil Falconer, and smiling Annabelle Erroll fell to the lot of the amiable Hew, while Mr. Tunley and the servants drew up rank entire in the vestibule; then, of course, the meal that followed was like any other in such an establishment, perfect, from the soup and dry sherry to the coffee and Maraschino.

'Tunley,' said Sir Piers, 'fill Mr. Falconer's glass. Glad to welcome you to Eaglescraig,' he added, bowing over a brimming glass of sherry; 'glad, indeed, to welcome one of my old Cameronians. I hope that, like me, you are proud of the old corps?'

'I am indeed, Sir Piers!' responded the young fellow with a kindling eye, that doubtless, like his heart, brightened under the genial and charming influences of his surroundings. 'I share, sir, to the full, the opinion of someone who says that no soldier is worth his salt unless he feels that he is as good as any man about him, and twice as good as any opposed to him.'

'Bravo, Falconer I you are one after my own heart! Gad, but he is a fine fellow,' he added in a low voice to Mrs. Garth; 'reminds me powerfully of some one I knew, long ago. Who the deuce can it be?'

In the extremity of his kindness at that moment, he actually thought him like his dead son, so the old man's whole heart went out to the new-comer, in whose favour this fanciful idea operated powerfully. 'His father and mother have long been dead, I understand, and he joined the Cameronians fresh from school—a mere boy, as I did myself.'

He looked almost tenderly on the young man, who was quite unconscious that he was an object of any particular interest; and his eyes kindled, but a sigh escaped as he recalled his own hot youth, and

'Thought of the days that were long since gone by,
When his limbs were strong and his courage was high,'

and ere his once firm and stately stride had given place to what he called 'a species of half-pay shamble.'

'By the way, Falconer,' said Sir Piers, whose pet weakness was pedigree, 'there was an old family of your name, who had an estate in this Bailiwick of Cunninghame—perhaps you are a branch of it?'

The young man coloured rather perceptibly (as Hew was not slow to perceive and make a note of), and said with a smile:

'I was educated out of Scotland; my father died in my youth, and my mother set no store on such fortuitous things as name or pedigree.'

'A sad mistake,' said Sir Piers, shaking his white head. 'The Falconers I speak of were a branch of the Falconers, lords of Halkertoun, who took their name from their office, being falconers to our kings of old, as we learn from Douglas—aye, so far back as the twelfth century.'

'I know not, general, of what Falconers I come,' replied the young officer a little curtly; then he added, with a smile: 'I only know that I was not born with the proverbial silver spoon, but with a wooden one, of the largest size.'

Sir Piers felt intuitively that he had touched a delicate subject, and changed it at once, though for a Scotsman not to know what kith or kin he came of seemed certainly incomprehensible; but Hew, aware of the vast value he attached to the most fortuitous circumstances of birth, family, and position, thought:

'No pedigree! By Jove! our Cameronian will find but small favour here now.'

'Tunley has got some magnificent Marcobruner and Lafitte in the cellar, Falconer,' said Sir Piers; 'I must have your opinion—but if I only look at them, I should have a twinge of my old enemy the gout.'

Falconer bowed his thanks, and was turning again to address Mary, when Sir Piers took his attention by plunging once more into Central India, and a stream of anecdotes about 'what the service and the regiment were in my time,' till the ladies withdrew, and, to Hew's disgust, there followed, of course, a professional conversation, on which he was totally unable to enter; thus he could only sip his wine, toy with the grape-scissors, or crack an occasional nut, while hearing Sir Piers laughing at jokes that seemed destitute of all fun to him, and all matters of 'shop' were discussed with the keenest relish—the new head-dress for the Line, the new pattern musket, and endless anecdotes of the mess-room and parade, to all of which Hew, not unnaturally, perhaps, listened with ill-disguised impatience; and even when the conversation halted irregularly between music and literature, or art and politics, home and foreign, he could not enter thereon, as Hew abhorred all books save a betting one, and read no journal save the Sporting Times.

Cecil Falconer rose to rejoin the ladies, but the general was in no mood to spare him, and insisted again and again on one more glass of dry sherry, 'just as a white-washer;' and of course that, 'by the way,' reminded him of 'how we used to be annoyed at Agra by the musk-rats running over the wine-bottles, and communicating a confounded flavour of musk to the sherry, which is no improvement to the wine, I can tell you; and it is a curious fact that every English resident in India tastes musk in his wine at some time or other, though there are some who assert it is a mere superstition. When we were at Agra and elsewhere up country, we had deuced little money among us in the Cameronians, yet somehow we always spent a devil of a lot of it; for every fellow drew a bill on every other fellow, so there was a regular crossfire of blue paper from right to left.'

To these and other reminiscences Falconer listened with his mind full of the bright smile accorded to him by Mary Montgomerie, when he had adroitly anticipated Hew in opening the door when the ladies departed to the drawing-room, whither he longed to follow them, and from whence the notes of the piano seemed to come as an invitation to do so, but he was compelled to endure anecdotes about India ad nauseam.

'By Jove, Sir Piers,' said Hew, wearily, 'I detest India; I've had enough of it!'

'I don't mean you to have any more of it, Hew, and you know that well,' replied Sir Piers kindly, his heart mellowed with wine; 'but you are mistaken in your views of it. "India," says a writer, correctly, I think, "is quite a misrepresented country, and has nothing objectionable in it, but a tiger or two, and a little heat in the warm part of the day."

The night was considerably advanced when they joined the ladies. Mrs. Garth had already retired; and the jolly old general, who had fully partaken of more wine than he usually did, stood in orderly-room fashion, with his feet apart on the rich hearthrug and his back to the fire, winking, blinking, smiling blandly, and not sure whether he was expected to take the field at the head of the Cameronians to-morrow; while at the piano there was performed a little brilliant singing, which Hew, with growing irritation, secretly stigmatised as 'the most duffing caterwauling!' and sat apart sulking (wine had usually this effect upon him), and leaving to Falconer the inevitable and pleasant task of turning the music leaves, and his eyes watched alternately the handsome and well-formed young fellow, who bent with ease and confidence admiringly over the singers, who, with voices sweetly attuned, were performing a duet, and the forms of the latter, so different in the character of their beauty—Mary with her hair of rich dark brown, and Annabelle, the blonde, with her sunny coils, that shone with a remarkable sheen in the flood of radiance that fell from the chandelier.

But the night waned apace, and at last it was necessary to separate, if any justice was to be done to the cover shooting on the morrow, now close at hand.

Hew gave Falconer his hand, which to the latter seemed clammy and quite like the tail of a fish; but the general insisted on escorting him to his 'quarters,' as he said, and conducted him, candle in hand, along one or two stately corridors adorned with fine paintings—two, that were of Cardinal York and King James VIII., evinced the Jacobite proclivities of Sir Piers' ancestors—and there, too, were trophies of the chase, both European and Asiatic. Never had Hew or the girls known the usually grave and rather stately old baronet 'in such a merry pin' (Hew suggested 'so screwed'); but as he threaded the corridors he was heard to sing a scrap of an old Anglo-Indian ditty:

'Good-bye to the batta!—to lighten
The pangs of each blooming cadet;
And the brows of the captains to brighten,
They've doubled the one epaulette;
They've added some lace to our jackets,
Augmented the price of our caps,
In the hope that the half-batta rackets
Will merge in the glare of our "traps."
Just as any new plaything bewitches
The sulks out of little boys whipped;
And before they've well pulled up their breeches,
They wholly forget they've been stripped.'

'Ah, yes, Falconer, my lad, that song was known long before your day, when the beggars cut down the batta. But here you are—no, here; this is the door. Good-night; hope you'll sleep sound. No need for a chowree to whisk inside the curtains here, as in India, and after making them safe all round the mattress, spring in through the hole you leave (like Harlequin through his hoop), lest a cloud of mosquitoes follow. I remember, at Dumdum—no, at Dinapore, my son Piers and Ballachulish of the Cameronians——' Then his voice broke as he spoke of his son, and he added: 'But I'll tell you about it to-morrow. Breakfast at nine, and then—hey for the covers!'

And now Sir Piers, whose voice had become certainly somewhat 'feathery,' betook him to his own room, pausing on the way more than once, candle in hand, as his aristocratic ideas of family, and that pride of birth which had been his ruling passion and sin in early life, occurred to him, and he muttered, pausing in his progress to bed, and shaking his white head:

'Doesn't know what Falconers he's of—a strange thing—a pity. My boy Piers forgot, too, what Montgomeries he was of, once on a time. A fine fellow, though!'

As for the latter, he was simply enchanted with Eaglescraig and all the details thereof: the beauty of the two girls, each so different in its character, and the savoir vivre of the old general. As for Hew, he forgot all about him.

Meanwhile, a few rooms distant, the lady's-maid was sleepily combing out the dark and luxuriant tresses of Mary Montgomerie, and the light of a shaded lamp fell softly and tenderly upon the graceful figures of herself and Annabelle, seated in their robes de chambre (chatting as young girls will always do when preparing for rest), on the looped-up lace curtains of their pretty beds, knotted one with blue and the other with rose-coloured ribbons; on the toilet-tables, with their glittering trinkets, and crystal bottles with gold or silver stoppers; on vases of conservatory flowers, and all the pretty luxuries which are usually to be found in the vicinity of youth, wealth, and beauty, as each girl sat smilingly contemplating herself in a long looking-glass, with all her rippling hair floating down over her white shoulders.

'And you like him?' said Mary, after the maid had withdrawn.

'Oh, so much!' exclaimed Annabelle; 'he is quite a dear fellow.'

'He has a gentle voice and gentle eyes, certainly,' said Mary, musingly.

'And to me looks somehow like one who has a history beyond that of other young men.'

'A history—what a funny idea! Of course he'll have a history, which, perhaps, like other young subs, he would rather not have made patent to everyone. But you and he seemed to have some little interest in common, Annabelle?'

'Had we?' said the latter, colouring a little.

'He spoke to you often of his friend, the other sub—what is his name?'

'Leslie Fotheringhame,' replied Annabelle in a low voice.

'Do you wish Sir Piers had invited him?'

'Perhaps, Mary,' said Annabelle, with a little forced laugh. 'Yet better not, better not,' she thought, with a memory of the days when her hand had thrilled at the touch of Leslie's, even before words of love had been spoken, and there had only been in her ear those broken utterances which a woman seldom, perhaps never, forgets.

So, save in the instance of Hew, all their first impressions of each other were favourable, and the young girls, as each laid her head on her pillow, began already to scheme out pleasant little visions, they scarcely knew of what.

CHAPTER IV.
COVER SHOOTING.

Jovial and laughing was the party which assembled at breakfast next day, in the bright morning-room of Eaglescraig, though the December landscape looked bleak enough without.

Mary, in all the freshness of her morning beauty, presided at one end of the loaded table, and Mrs. Garth at the other. Sir Piers was still in his room; but there was Cecil Falconer, in a shooting-suit of the best taste, and having of course innumerable pockets; Hew in rather 'loud'-patterned knickerbockers; a couple of jolly, red-faced country gentlemen, the village doctor, and old Mr. John Balderstone (of whom much more anon), the trusted land agent and local factor of Sir Piers, and deemed one of the best shots in the Bailiwick of Cunninghame, a hale, hearty, ruddy-faced man, with an ample paunch and short sturdy legs encased in long brown gaiters.

'How is Sir Piers this morning, Mr. Hew?' he asked that personage, who was intent on a pile of grouse pie, for the breakfast was a genuine Scottish one, a veritable dinner, with the addition of tea and coffee pots covered with elaborate cosies of Mary's handiwork. 'Well, I hope, and that he goes to shoot with us?'

'Well?—I should think so; hearty and lively,' replied Hew, with his mouth full; 'by Jove, he looks as if he was likely to live for ever! He's got the receipt for old Parr's life pills, and the secret of Methuselah too,' was the ungenerous—even coarse—response of Hew, half spoken to himself, and speaking volumes as to his secret thoughts; a response which made worthy old John Balderstone first raise and then knit his shaggy grey eyebrows; 'but here he comes, to answer for himself.'

Laughing and smiling, he greeted all in rapid succession, Cecil Falconer perhaps first of all, and then he kissed Mary; and anyone who saw how old Sir Piers held her hand and gazed into her tender hazel eyes, might have seen and known that she was the one hope of his now childless old age, and I doubt if he would have dined or breakfasted comfortably without her.

He bowed over the hand of Annabelle Erroll, with something of stately, old-fashioned courtesy; he patted Hew on the head as if he had been a boy, and then took a place beside him, after a glance at the weather without, with reference to the shooting. He wore a suit of rough grey tweed, with strong shoes and long brown leather leggings, that had seen service many a time and oft among the beans and turnip-fields all round Eaglescraig; and yet in this—the plainest of all costumes—he looked every inch what he was, a grand-looking and aristocratic old gentleman.

Shooting anecdotes, the qualities of certain dogs, guns, cartridges, new shot-belts, and so forth, were being discussed on all sides, together with eggs, ham, cold pie and steaming coffee; amid all of which Cecil Falconer strove in vain, even by the offer of a chicken-bone, to win the favour of Mary's pet terrier Snarley, which he was disposed for her sake to view and approach tenderly; but in return her favourite showed a whole set of sharp white teeth, and retreating under his mistress's chair, snarled and repelled the least attempt at familiarity, even when she caught the little brute up in her arms and bestowed upon it kisses, which to Cecil's eye seemed a great waste of something very charming.

'My pet, my own pet!' she called it, Snarley the while eyeing Falconer as if he was his natural enemy or future rival.

'Hope you slept well, Falconer?' said Sir Piers.

'Thanks—like a veritable top,' replied Cecil.

'Right! a regular soldier should be able to sleep anywhere, and never be surprised on awakening in new quarters.'

'Been ever in this part of the world before, sir?' asked Mr. John Balderstone, with his mouth full.

'Never,' replied Cecil.

'Ah, you'll soon learn to like Eaglescraig,' added the factor.

'I am enchanted with it already,' said Cecil, as his eye involuntarily wandered in Mary's direction; 'and believe that I shall like it more and more, till it will be quite a wrench when the time comes to tear myself away.'

'Then come back, Falconer, for some rod-fishing after Candlemas,' suggested his host, with a bright smile.

'Duty, I fear, may clash with your great hospitality; but I thank you, Sir Piers.'

'Call me general; I like it better.'

'To be always called so is my uncle's pet fancy, Mr. Falconer,' said Mary.

'All great men have their weaknesses, and I always respect them,' remarked Hew, with one of his scarcely perceptible sneers, for now Sir Piers, to his irritation, had plunged into some reminiscences of snipe-shooting at Dumdum, where he was wont to be for some hours up to the waist in water under a burning Bengal sun, necessitating frequent libations of brandy-pawnee; then, by some rapid transition of thought, he found himself detailing a march of the Cameronians through the jungles of Arcot, with the rain pouring in torrents, the road knee-deep in mud and mire, the men drenched, the tents soaked through, the mess and baggage animals miles in the rear, the column having to cross a nullah where the water ran like a mill-race, and there was the devil to pay!

Other anecdotes would have followed, but Hew, who had seen enough of India in reality too, proposed a move to the gun-room and thence to the covers.

'Time indeed to be off, gentlemen,' said the general, looking at his watch. 'Tunley, fill those flasks.'

'And have more sandwiches cut,' added Mrs. Garth.

'I shall cut them for Mr. Falconer; he is the only stranger here,' said Mary Montgomerie, hurrying to the sideboard, and proceeding deftly with her pretty hands to do so; while Cecil murmured his thanks, and tendered his silver case, or sandwich-box.

'Can't the cook do this?' growled Hew in her ear.

'Yes, but not half so well as I,' replied the girl, laughingly. 'I can be so expert when I choose, Hew.'

In the hall, where hung all manner of hats and greatcoats, plaids, whips, salmon-listers, whips and walking-sticks, Sir Piers assumed an old and well-worn wideawake, the band of which was usually garnished with hooks and flies, for he was as keen a sportsman with his rod and line as with his double-barrelled gun. And now the whole party set forth from the house, Cecil looking more than once to the soft faces of the two smiling girls, who, from the breakfast-room window, watched their departure.

His mind already was full of sweet Mary Montgomerie, and he would rather, a thousand times, have remained, to sun himself in the light of her winning eyes, than to toil through the damp covers to knock over a few rabbits or a brace of harmless birds; and he could but console himself by counting the hours that must inevitably elapse ere he could meet her again, and strive to endure them as best he might.

Hew detected one of these glances thrown back to 'the face at the window,' and remembering his ramble with Mary in the Dovecot Park, bit his nether lip; and before the day's shooting was over, Falconer had a specimen of what the amiable Hew might be capable of doing if provoked.

Preoccupied thus, Cecil Falconer thought that on this particular morning 'the Land of Burns' seemed uncommonly dreary. Mist was rolling along the valleys, and the landscape looked dank and moist through its medium.

Hew, who, though not ungentlemanlike in bearing, was, as we have said, naturally coarse in mind, and sometimes blunt in manner, the result of association with billiard-markers and stablemen, on seeing Falconer give another glance towards the house, said abruptly, and with what he meant to be a laugh:

'I don't think you can see her now.'

'Her—who?' asked Falconer, with surprise.

'Well, my cousin; for I think you evidently admire her.'

'An odd remark!' thought Cecil, looking a little annoyed; but he said, cordially:

'I do indeed admire her; who could fail to do so? But what leads you to infer that I do so more particularly?'

'By Jove! I saw that your eyes were seldom off her; but it is no use, Mr. Falconer,' said Hew, with a pretended genial laugh, 'as she has no eyes in reality—save for one fellow.'

'What the deuce can he mean?' thought Falconer, a little annoyed by the speaker's manner, which seemed to indicate advice or warning, or impertinence.

'You are cousins, then?' he merely said coldly.

'Well, of course, in a manner of way—rather remote, you know,' replied Hew, his closely-set eyes looking more shifty than ever, as he scraped a match and lighted a huge cigar; 'but blood is thicker than water, and it goes a long way in Scotch reckonings; and thus she naturally looks to me as the future head of the house,' he added complacently, 'as the heir of entail. And Mary is indeed handsome! There was no girl handsomer out last season, or when she was presented—I mean in the quiet and thoroughbred style.'

'What a cad this fellow is!' thought Falconer.

'Ah, you have looked admiringly back at the house,' said Sir Piers, who had another theory on the subject; 'the old tower is the part of it that is most to my taste. The cliff was called Eaglescraig, because ages ago a couple of gigantic eagles built a nest there every summer—a nest of branches and great sticks on the giddy verge of the cliff—and the vicinity of it was always found strewed with the bones of muirfowl, ptarmigan, rabbits, and even lambs. A poor man who lived near it made quite a subsistence for himself and his family, during a famine consequent on an English invasion, by robbing the eaglets of the food brought by the parents; and one day he found a little fair-skinned and golden-haired child therein, brought no one knew from where, by the male bird, but safe and sound. It grew to be a man of vast strength and stature, and he carried the banner of the Bailiwick at the battle of Largs—and certainly that field was not fought and won yesterday.'

The day was unquestionably a bleak one. The last few leaves were fluttering down from the bare trees, the branches and twigs of which stood blankly and darkly up against the dull grey sky; elsewhere the red and brown remnant of rustling foliage that still lingered on the oaks and ashes was thinned by every passing breeze; and even the gay cock pheasant, as he skimmed over the gorse to seek his food in the untilled land, might be heard to croak as he went.

Grim old Sandy Swanshot, the head-keeper, and his staff, had already traversed the covers; the muzzled ferrets had been down in the rabbit burrows, scaring forth the occupants; firm, stealthy, and quick-eyed, they drove them into the gorse or elsewhere, and now the earth had been stopped everywhere, barring all return to their well-known holes, which they would never find again.

The cottage of the keeper, old Sandy, a veteran sportsman, silver-haired and wrinkled, who had often carried the general's game-bag when they were both 'school laddies,' was a busy scene that morning. It was a thatched edifice, garlanded round with dead wild-cats, weasels, foumarts, hawks, and 'other vermin,' which in their decay tainted the winter air, and its occupant was old enough to remember when the system of shooting with muzzle-loaders was very different from what it is to-day; when a cover was beaten with a precision quite military, and when the order 'Halt! reload!' went down the line, every man, be he shooter or beater, had to stop where he was, until the last barrel had been charged anew; and the old man had a supreme contempt for the perilous style of blazing away that had come in with arms of precision and the slaughter of battues.

All the dogs around him seemed to know instinctively that they were about to take the field, and kept up a chorus of mingled whining and barking; and all the beaters were there, somewhat motley in aspect and appearance, but all doffing their bonnets respectfully, as Sir Piers came up with his 'guns' from the manor-house; and each of the latter underwent, unknown to himself, a critical scrutiny under the keen eyes of these practised fellows—his dress, his gun, his gaiters, his shot-belt, every buckle and strap being duly noticed and commented on.

We may hope that Cecil Falconer's bearing and equipment carried him through this unknown ordeal; but the old keeper, who had an instinctive dislike of Hew Montgomerie, whispered to him as a stranger, though Sandy was, in Scottish parlance, a dour carl:

'Gie him a wide berth in the cover, sir! Shooting? he might as well be ballooning!'

Sandy knew some of Hew's vagaries when at cover, such as shooting down the line of the beaters and his companions, letting fly at a bird whose flight was no higher than a man's head, fingering his trigger, heedless of whether the muzzle was pointed to the sky or the earth, and as careless of his friends as if they were clad in Milan mail; for he was one of those awkward fellows who had not even the simple prudence which Charles Dickens ascribes to the obese Mr. Tracy Tupman, when that personage discovered that his chief object was to fire his gun without danger to his friends, himself, or the dogs.

The covers of Eaglescraig were of considerable extent, and were well preserved and carefully looked after; and though Sir Piers, as he said, thought it very slow work compared with pig-sticking in six-foot-high jungle-grass, or potting a man-eater from a howdah, it was what suited him now, and in less than five minutes he had all his 'guns' in 'order of battle,' marshalled apart in a line of about a hundred and forty yards or so, the beaters being chequered in the gaps between the sportsmen.

Advancing thus, like skirmishers in extended order, on the right flank of the line, were masses of whin-bush (or gorse as it is called in England), displaying still here and there a golden flower; and away on the left the cover went deep into the dark recesses of a copse, under the tall red stems of Scottish firs, larch, and ash-trees.

Hew and Cecil were in this quarter, and a little in the rear was the keeper, the latter scanning the whole, as far as he well could, from flank to flank, rebuking from time to time, in his deep, broad Ayrshire Doric, any stupid beater who lagged behind, while the sharp crack of the guns woke the echoes of the dingles, which occasionally seemed to reply to quite an irregular volley.

Among the gorse the chief victims were ground game, but amid the coppice the ruddy golden-hued pheasants were momentarily flurried up, and arrested in their whirring flight by the crack of the fatal breechloader.

Ever and anon, the voice of the keeper was heard, with the prohibitory cry of—

''Ware hen—'ware hen, Master Hew!'

Among much other spoil, Cecil knocked over a fine cock-pheasant, which fell crashing down among the underwood in the agonies of death—a charge of shot in his gold-speckled breast.

'Why the deuce did you shoot my bird, sir?' demanded Hew with un courteous abruptness of Falconer.

'He thocht, perhaps, ye war gaun to miss it, as ye did the last twa, and the hare,' said the old keeper, drily.

'I beg your pardon,' replied Cecil quietly, as he reloaded; 'but that bird was mine.'

'It was not!' was the blunt and rude rejoinder.

Falconer coloured and bit his lip; but thought of his courtly old host, and desirous of avoiding a scene, simply said:

'Let us keep further apart, Mr. Montgomerie.'

'As far off as you please,' added Hew ungraciously, and moving further away to his left.

Cecil continued to work his way between the crowded fir and larch stems, which, by receiving many a charge of shot, saved the birds that hovered beyond them, the voice of the keeper crying ever and anon: 'Mark cock!' 'Hare forward!' ''Ware hen.' 'A hare for you, Master Hew—a miss again!' 'Come to heel, Countess—come to heel!' the latter, with the vicious whack of a whip, was directed to one of the pointers.

While Cecil was inwardly laughing at Hew's wild shooting, a charge of shot from the right whizzed past his face and tore away the rim of his hat.

A natural exclamation of rage and alarm escaped him, as he had so narrowly escaped having his sight destroyed or his face disfigured for life, and looking whence the shot came, he saw Hew gently slipping another cartridge into the breech of his gun, under cover of a great Scottish fir with a red gnarled stem.

'I shall thank you, sir, to keep your muzzle up, or quit the ground!' said Falconer, angrily.

'It was a devil of a mistake—and I beg your pardon,' replied Hew, giving his cold damp hand to Cecil, who saw—or thought he saw—a quiet twinkle of mingled malice and amusement in the speaker's bilious eye.

'Blundering fool! Could he have meant it? Looks deuced like it—but why?' thought the young officer more angrily, as he thought over the matter.

'He weel-nigh shot Sir Piers in the same unco fashion, sir,' grumbled the old keeper; while Cecil now changed his ground again, and for actual safety kept closer to Hew than ever.

Four long beats through the covers brought luncheon-time, and while flasks and sandwiches were produced, the slain were counted as they were laid in long rows on the side of a grassy bank, each keeper, as he came up in succession, adding his quota to the general stock, all furred and feathered victims from the covers of Eaglescraig, and so numerous, that the sportsmen thought enough had been done for one day.

'I may deem myself lucky that I was not added to your bag to-day, Mr. Montgomerie,' said Cecil, laughing, but not with genuine hilarity.

'What! has Hew been at his old tricks again?' asked Sir Piers, with an air of annoyance.

'E'en sae, sir,' said Sandy, taking a flask from his mouth, 'firing doon the line as before.'

'My gun exploded unexpectedly, sir,' said Hugh, with a sullen look; 'I explained to Mr. Falconer, and he has accepted my apology.'

Something in his manner caused this episode to rankle in the memory of Cecil.

'By Jove, I think the cad had intended to pot me, after all!' was his occasional thought, and he never precisely forgot or forgave the suspicion—one too grave in its diabolical spirit of mischief and cruelty to be dismissed lightly; and though he laughed at some jokes made by old Mr. Balderstone on the matter, he really saw nothing to laugh at in it, and was very well pleased when the whole party bent their steps homeward—all the more pleased when he thought of the pleasant society that awaited him.

Falconer began to wonder whether he was actually falling in love already with the beautiful grand-niece of his host. He had never believed much in 'that sort of thing,' at first sight especially; but he was young and impressionable; he possessed a keen imagination, and he already caught himself weaving mental conversations with her—conversations in which tender little speeches came involuntarily, though unuttered, to his lips, and soft smiles hovered on hers, when she seemed to hear them; but when—after changing his muddy shooting-costume for another—he joined the ladies in the drawing-room, remembering the almost rude remarks of Hew Montgomerie, Cecil, in approaching Mary, or conversing with her, had an angry sense of being watched, or observed, by that personage; though a time came when he ceased to think or care on the subject.

And who was 'the one fellow' for whom she had only eyes, as Hew had vulgarly phrased it? Most probably Hew meant himself! If so, Cecil thought that she cloaked or concealed her partiality with wonderful discretion.

To avoid interfering with that gentleman's views or wishes, Cecil gave much of his attention to Annabelle Erroll, and even to 'the old soldier,' as Hew called Mrs. Garth; but Mary summoned him to her side to see Snarley put through all his performances, such as leaping over her interlaced hands as through a ring, walking erect round the room for a lump of sugar, tossing another high off his sharp nose at the word of command, to catch it with a snap in its descent, and so forth, all the while he did so eyeing Cecil with undisguised hostility.

And eventually the evening closed in like the preceding one (save that old Sir Piers, worn out with his day's sport, had fallen asleep in an easy-chair, with a handkerchief spread over his face), with music and duet-singing, and pleasant conversation, ere some of the visitors rose to depart.

That there should be so much duet-singing, and Mary's occupation with the stranger, and that the general conversation was of a kind in which he could bear no prominent part, disgusted Hew, who was in a detestable humour; yet he had the policy to conceal it pretty well (though his bilious eye was more bilious than ever) till once, he drew near Mary, while Cecil, in another part of the room, was occupied with old Mrs. Garth, who was relating with great unction some memory of the Cameronians in her day; and now Hew's ready jealousy became painfully apparent.

'Good heavens, Hew!' said Mary, in a low voice, her dark eyes dilating as she spoke; 'what is this Mr. Balderstone has told us?'

'Can't say, for the life of me; the old pump!'

'That you nearly shot Mr. Falconer to-day in the Fir Wood.'

'Did I? Well, the blundering fellow was out of his proper place, I suppose,' was the sulky rejoinder.

'What a dreadful thing if you had injured him! Hew! you are positively dangerous.'

'My dear Mary, you deem him an Admirable Crichton, I doubt not,' said he, smilingly, in her ear.

'What do you deem him?'

'Slow and deuced ugly.'

'Ugly—oh, come, Hew!' said Mary, laughing very merrily at such undisguised jealousy, which somehow did not flatter her in the least—it was too comical.

'I have no doubt our "old soldier" here deems him a very eligible parti for anyone; a subaltern, with two shirts a week and a few dickies, by Jove!' he continued.

'How—how coarse you are!' said Mary, with her silvery laugh again; 'but don't let grand-uncle hear you sneering thus. He, too, was a subaltern once.'

'Yes, but with the rent-roll of Eaglescraig! I wish him well out of our neighbourhood anyway,' he added threateningly.

'Why, what harm has he done you?'

'None as yet,' replied Hew, getting more sulky than ever; 'but I may harm him!'

'How?'

'If he comes in my way with you, Mary, or anyone else—understand that clearly, cousin.'

Mary's brow darkened, and a haughty expression, not unmixed with alarm, stole into her hazel eyes and soft face, as she said, while quickly using her fan:

'Hew, you forget yourself, and me too! How dare you adopt this tone?'

'Don't think to make a fool of me, Mary.'

'Impossible, sir!'

'You think so?'

'Yes. Nature has been before me,' she replied, as she rose and swept across the room to the side of old Mr. Balderstone.

The eyes of Hew, like those of Uriah Heep, 'seemed to take any shade of colour that could make eyes ugly,' as they followed her beautiful figure, and a savage emotion gathered in his avaricious heart as he felt that the chances of his wooing with success—a wooing that was without pure love—were receding further away than ever; but whatever were his thoughts, to show that there was no bad feeling between Cecil Falconer and himself, after all had retired to rest that night, he invited the former to have a quiet little game of écarté in the smoking-room—a game from which the Cameronian did not, somehow, come away a winner.

CHAPTER V.
HEW MAKES A VOW.

For the next few days Cecil Falconer continued to give Hew a 'gey wide berth,' as the old keeper phrased it, at the covers, where each day's shooting was precisely like that which preceded it. If Hew, thought Falconer, were capable of such mad jealousy and dastardly cruelty after a few hours' acquaintance, of what might he not be capable and guilty in the time to come?

Was it his blundering stupidity which, as the gamekeeper said, had nearly cost Sir Piers his life once before, or a spirit of infernal malevolence to revenge the petty dispute about the cock-pheasant, that made him fire his gun in the way he had done?

At times Cecil was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and as he was not of a resentful temperament, he gradually either forgot the event, or remembered it only as a mistake, that might have proved more serious than it did. So each day's shooting passed pleasantly over, and the evenings were devoted to music in the drawing-room, where Mrs. Garth dispensed tea at a pretty little oval table—fragrant orange Pekoe, out of tiny eggshell cups, without handles—and where Sir Piers fell fast asleep over his Scotsman; and the night wound up by Hew luring Falconer into what he termed 'a little mild play' in the smoking-room—play from which the latter always rose a loser, without being able precisely to know how.

Save for this kind of thing, which he could ill afford, Falconer thought the brief term of his leave would be delightfully spent at Eaglescraig. A 'green yule' had come and gone, without skating or curling, and the owl whooped nightly on the old tower-head, where the winter wind shook the masses of ivy on the time-worn walls; and the New Year was ushered in with well-bred joviality, rather than the hearty old-fashioned uproariousness of the olden time, though in the drawing-room the chorus could be heard from the servant's hall, where Mr. Tunley led it with joyous vociferation, singing,

'Here's a health to the year that's awa'!'

And precisely as the house-clocks struck twelve—midnight—the house-door was unbarred with great formality, and thrown open to let the Old Year out, and the New Year in; and rising from his elbow-chair, Sir Piers kissed his niece Mary, and then old Mrs. Garth in a courtly fashion, an example Hew Montgomerie was not slow to follow on the soft cheek of the former, while Falconer looked laughingly, yet perhaps enviously, on, and dared only press her hand as he did that of Miss Erroll; and then there was a general handshaking with Mr. Balderstone and other old friends who had been invited to join the social circle.

The rubicund Mr. Tunley offered, in the name of all the servants, to drink their old master's good health, and the health of all the family; and Sir Piers, natheless all his pride, cordially shook the old butler's hand, and each wished the other many happy years to come; and he went through the same ceremony with all in the servants' hall.

In all this homely warmth, mutual kindness and goodwill, there was much that charmed Falconer; for though belonging to a Scottish regiment, and one famous in history, educated as he had been far away from his native country, and under peculiar circumstances, he knew little or nothing of the ways and customs of the latter.

He had been much a wanderer, and never knew a home, save such as he had found with his regiment; so there was much in the little circle at Eaglescraig to delight him. Save with Hew, he won golden opinions from all there; his genial manner, spirited good-humour, handsome bearing, and facile mode of adapting himself to those among whom chance threw him—a mode that came, perhaps, of his having been educated abroad—all seemed to make him a prime favourite.

He could speak much, and pleasantly, of what he had seen and where he had been; he was a reader, too, and the fruit of his reading cropped up pleasantly from time to time in the course of conversations that Hew could take little or no part in, greatly to his own wrath.

'What a place this is for gammon and spinach!' thought Hew, who viewed all this with extreme distaste, and still more the intimacy that progressed between this 'interloper,' as he deemed him, and Mary Montgomerie; for they nightly played together the mazurkas of Chopin and selections from the songs of Mendelssohn and the operas of Verdi, while Hew looked darkly and dubiously on, thinking there was in all this far more than met the eye; and Sir Piers thought, with a smile, that a Cameronian of his time would certainly not have shone much as a pianist.

Mary was always so happy in herself, that she usually made all others equally so; thus, in her society, the hours, with Falconer, seemed to fly like minutes.

Hew had—unknown to Sir Piers—become so seriously involved in monetary matters during his sojourn in India, that it was next to impossible for him to return there; and his chief hope for retrieving himself and doing well for the future lay in a marriage with Mary Montgomerie, rather than the prospective succession to the baronetcy and to the acres of Eaglescraig, for Sir Piers was a hale old fellow and might live for twenty years yet. Indeed, everyone said so.

Thus he viewed with extreme bitterness and jealousy the visit of Falconer and some of the details attendant on that visit, and his closely-set and parti-coloured eyes twinkled dangerously as he muttered:

'Devil take me if I don't bowl that fellow out yet!'

If Hew had been tender and true, less brusque and coarse—had really loved Mary with a loving heart—she might have felt some compunction for her laughing indifference to his suit; but she knew well his avarice, his monetary hopes, and suspected some of his vices; and, more than all, her proud spirit revolted at the idea of being made by her father's will the mere puppet of a family compact, and compelled to marry any man.

'I heard you arranging a riding-party to-morrow, Mary,' said he, during a pause (or while Falconer was being accompanied in an Italian song by Miss Erroll), and bending over Mary till his moustache nearly touched the white and close division in her rich dark-brown hair, while she idled over an album of Indian photographs.

'Yes—you will go, of course, Hew?' said she, looking up at him with her sunny hazel eyes bright with a smile.

'I would rather be excused,' he replied, sulkily.

'Why?'

'Why? because I should be only in the way.'

'Please yourself, Hew; but I do not understand you,' said Mary, colouring with annoyance; 'what do you mean?'

'I mean,' said he bluntly, and in a low, concentrated voice, 'that before this Cameronian fellow came, you and I were—were——'

'Were what?' asked Mary, sharply.

'Well, friends, at least.'

'And are we not friends now?' she said, laying her hand on his arm. He looked lingeringly at it—a lovely hand it was, round and white, with a golden bangle clasping the dimpled wrist—and he said in a low voice:

'I had hoped we should in time be something dearer——'

'Oh, stuff! Dear Hew, don't begin that sort of thing here,' replied Mary, laughing to conceal her annoyance; 'you will forget all about it when you go back to India again.'

Hew's face darkened ominously.

'But you don't like India?' added Mary, somewhat teasingly, while a roguish smile dimpled her cheeks.

'I hate it, as you know well; yet I may have to return there, for all that you care about it, or me.'

'There are tigers there, and snakes, and all those sort of things, Hew?'

'Yes, and perhaps you would like them to eat me?' he asked, viciously.

'Oh, Hew! how can you speak thus!' she exclaimed, laughing. 'I never said so.'