For a little we must leave both the narrow, sea-barriered, rock-girt bounds of Suliscanna and the flat, hard-won, and yet more hardly kept fields and polders of the Netherlands for the moorish pastures, the green, changeful woodlands, the flowery water-meadows of Balmaghie. It is necessary at this point to take a cast back in our story and tell of the strange things which have befallen Roger McGhie since we saw him at our tale's beginning, making his farewells by the stirrup-leather of my Lady Wellwood.

It was perhaps natural that the laird of Balmaghie, delicate of body, retiring of habit, a recluse from the society of roaring bears like Lag and Baldoon, who were his immediate neighbors, should succumb readily enough to the fascinations of my Lady Wellwood. It is not so obvious, on the other hand, why she found pleasure in the company of Roger McGhie.

It may be that the caustic kindliness, the flavor of antique chivalry, which had compelled to more than liking the unwonted heart of John Graham of Claverhouse, also had power to fascinate the widow of the Duke of Wellwood. That title had been one of the late king's making, and in the absence of heirs direct, it had lapsed immediately on the death of the king's minister and administrator in Scotland, while the original impoverished earldom of Wellwood had gone back to a kinsman remotely collateral. So my lady never forgot that she was not "the dowager" merely, but still, in the face of all—Susannah, first and only Duchess of Wellwood.

Nevertheless, to her credit, perhaps, as a woman of discernment, she married Roger McGhie, and that though far younger, richer, and gallanter men stood ready at her call. But the needy king and his new ministry had stripped her estates of most that her husband had so painfully gathered. Little was left her but the barren heritages of Grenoch—where, indeed, was heather enough and granite to spare, but where crops were few and scanty, and where even meadow-hay had a fashion of vanishing in the night whenever the Dee water took it into its head to sweep through the narrow Lane, raising the loch till it overflowed the low-lying meads nearly to the house-door of Grenoch itself.

Then, on the other hand, the acres of Balmaghie were undoubtedly broad, the finances of the laird unhurt by government exactions, and the house of Balmaghie a wide and pleasant place compared with the little square block-house of the Grenoch, sitting squatly like a moorhen's-nest on its verge of reedy loch.

So the Lady Susannah became, not long after Kate betook herself to Holland, the mistress of Balmaghie; but from some feeling of restraint or shame Roger McGhie had hitherto carefully kept the matter from his daughter, whose sentiments in the matter he had good reasons to suspect.

It had not seemed the least of the attractions of the house of Balmaghie to my lady that at the time of her marriage it wanted the presence of the girl who till now had been its mistress. And she resolved that, once out, Kate should abide so—that is, till the time came when a match politically and socially suitable could be found for the girl, and also a home not too near the well-trimmed garden pleasances of Balmaghie.

So when Murdo McAlister, Lord of Barra, arrived at the dismantled fortalice of Thrieve as the guest of my Lord Maxwell, and word was brought that the exile desired an audience with "the lady of Balmaghie," the duchess listened complacently enough to the words of the Lord of Barra and the Small Isles. The courtier dwelt much on the changes which were so sure to come, the favor of the king's son-in-law, his own great position in Holland, and the yet greater to be attained when his Dutch master should take over the throne of Britain.

And we may be sure that my Lord of Barra spoke well. Calmly he told of the dangerous position of the young maid in Holland; lightly he referred to his own "rescue" of her in the Street of the Butchery—of which, indeed, Kate had herself given an account in one of her rare letters to her father from the city of Amersfort. He told how she was quartered unsuitably with private soldiers and their wives. But there he trod on dangerous ground, for in a moment the laird took up his parable against him.

"Lochinvar and young Earlstoun may indeed be private soldiers in Dutchdom," said Roger McGhie, bluntly, "but do not forget that they are very good Galloway gentlemen here."

"Then," said Barra, "they had been greatly the better of remembering it in the Low Country. I speak with some heat, for I carry here in my side the unhealed wound dealt me in revenge by the knife of a girl of the streets whom Wat Gordon of Lochinvar took with him in his flight."

And still pale from his long illness, my Lord Barra in his dress of black velvet certainly appeared a most interesting figure to my lady of Balmaghie, who had a natural eye for such.

Then, taking courage from her evident sympathy, he went on to tell how with the help of Captain Smith of the Sea Unicorn, a respectable magistrate of the county of Dorset, he had again "rescued" Kate McGhie from her perilous position; how he had aided her to escape to the home of a lowland woman of good family, the wife of one of his own vassals, on the safe and suitable island of Suliscanna, to which place he asked the favor of the company, of "Her Grace"—he desired pardon—of the Lady Balmaghie and her husband.

Whereupon, with voluble good-will from the lady and a certain dry and silent acquiescence from Roger McGhie, my Lord of Barra obtained his request. And so behold them sitting together when the Sea Unicorn overhauled the tide-driven boat of our young adventurers, and the treacherous sea-mists delivered Kate and her lover into the hands of the enemies of their loves.

"You are very welcome on board the ship Sea Unicorn," said Barra, bowing to the pair as they stood hand-in-hand on the deck.

Wat could not utter a word, so appalling a hopelessness pressed upon his spirit, such blank despair tore like an eagle at his heart.

But the lady of Balmaghie smiled upon him, even as of old her Grace the Duchess of Wellwood had done. Then she shook her head with coquettish reproach.

"Ah, Lochinvar," she cooed, "what is this we have heard of you? You come on board the Sea Unicorn off the isle of Suliscanna with one fair maid; you left the city of Amersfort with another. I fear me you have as little as ever of the grace of constancy. But after all, young men, alas! still will be young men. And indeed the age is noways a constant one!"

And my lady sighed as if the fatal gifts of constancy and continence had been the ever-present blights of her own life.

Then, suddenly as the lightning that shines from east to west, it flashed upon Wat how foolish he had been not to tell Kate all the story of the Little Marie. He realized now how easily, nay, how inevitably, all that had happened at the prison and among the sand-dunes might be used to his hurt. So, flushing to the temples, he stood silent.

Kate turned to her lover. A happy light of confidence shone in her eye.

"Tell my lady," she said, "that in her eagerness to think well of you according to her lights, she has given ear to false rumors. Tell her that it was to rescue me from the cruel treachery of my Lord Barra that you broke the prison bars and came over land and sea to take me out of his hands."

Barra smiled subtly, looking keenly at Wat from under the drooping eyelids of his triangular eyes, which glittered like the points of bayonets.

"It is indeed true," said Wat, at last, forcing himself to speak, "that I—that I escaped out of prison and traced this maid over land and sea till I found her a captive on the island of Suliscanna. It was my intention—"

"To return her to her father's care, no doubt," said Barra, dropping his words carefully, like poison into a bowl.

"To beseech her to wed with me so soon as I should reach the main-land," said Wat, bravely.

A change came over the countenance of my Lady Wellwood at the words. Though she had married Roger McGhie, it was not in her nature to let any former gallant cavalier escape her snares, nor yet to permit her plans of great political alliances in the future, based upon the girl's union with Barra, to be brought to naught.

But again the sneering voice of Barra cut the embarrassing silence.

"It was, then, I doubt not, in the company of this lady, whose hand you hold, that you drugged the jailer of Amersfort, broke the prison, and escaped. It was this lady who, being well acquainted with the purlieus of that temple of harlotry, the Hostel of the Coronation, stole three horses from Sheffell, the landlord, and rode with you and your boon companion Scarlett—a man false to as many services as he has sworn allegiance to—out to the sand-dunes of Lis, where you and she abode till you found a passage to England. In all this you had, doubtless, the companionship and assistance of no other woman than this lady, whom with such noble and honorable condescension you now desire to marry. She it was (declare it briefly, true swain) who lied for you, stole for you, fought for you, abode with you, died for you—as the catch has it, 'all for love and nothing for reward.'"

At the close of Barra's speech Kate turned to Wat.

"Tell them," she said, "that there was no such woman with you."