Wallowby being a stranger was told to keep hold of the guide, and Sophia was entrusted to their joint care. Mary and Peter having both some knowledge of the hills and the country followed next, while Roderick who had often shot over the ground, undertook to pilot the old lady. The three groups were to keep together as well as they could, and by constant shouting they hoped to keep within each other's ken.
With infinite care, groping and feeling around at every step, they commenced to descend, the grey obscurity swallowing them up, and concealing each group from the others. The voices seemed muffled by the fog, but they enabled them still to hold together.
Down they went, stumbling over loose stones, clambering down rocks and slipping among the heather now dripping with moisture, Mrs. Sangster vowing it should be her last expedition of the kind, if ever she got safe to 'bigget land' again.
'Hold more to the left!' shouted the guide, an injunction which Mrs. Sangster hastened to obey, though still very far from the point it was meant to apply to and thereby found herself on a steep rock face, where she was compelled to turn round, and grasping the heather bushes above, to step gingerly backwards, down into the unknown.
'Oh! Mr. Roderick, this is awful!'
'Another step and you will come to level foothold again.'
'Oh! but I can't; I am caught in something. There it goes--and now I have lost my gold spy-glass, something has caught the chain and broken it. Oh, Mr. Roderick! will you help me to find it! I shall never be able to read my psalm-book on Sunday, if I lose it. Oh dear! oh dear! what an old fool I have been. Skemmeling over Findochart like a nine-year old!'
Roderick shouted to the others to wait, but the cry lost itself in the mist, or was misunderstood. The voices from below came up fainter and fainter, and finally they were heard no more.
The search for the 'spy-glass' occupied some time, and all their attention, but eventually it was found within a foot or two of where they stood, and it was not till then that they discovered they were alone on the hillside. Roderick shouted till he was hoarse, but there came no response, and it became evident they must shift for themselves.
'Most disgraceful conduct! such heartlessness! To think that Peter Sangster, my own son, whom I have sat up with, and nursed through measles and hooping-cough, till my back was like to break, should drag his old mother up here among the clouds, and then desert her!' and here the old lady began to whimper, but took care to make the 'spy-glass' secure in some inner receptacle of her dress.