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?'