“Very little indeed,” I answered, recalling our bond; “but she cursed his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old soldier of Sweden.”
“God ward all evil!” cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. “You’ll be glad to see your friend M’Iver back, I make no doubt.”
“Oh! he’s an old hand at war, madam; he’ll come safe out of this by his luck and skill, if he left the army behind him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said she, smiling.
“What!” I cried in raillery; “would you be grateful for so poor a balance left of a noble army?”
And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the dinner-table.
In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter, the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time, was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful prospect—too briefly ours—that the country would settle anon to peace.
CHAPTER VIII.—THE BALE-FIRES ON THE BENS.
Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.