of her voice, and her sweet ways, and the very way she walked, too, and the tenderness of her heart.  There was a sort of wonder about her; whatever she did or said was so beautiful, and simple, and sweet!  And day after day I said to myself that my interest in this beautiful woman was nothing.  Some one told me there had been rumors:  I laughed.  Could any one suppose I was going to play Pendennis over again?  And then as the time came for me to leave, I was glad, and I was miserable at the same time.  I despised myself for being miserable.  And then I said to myself, ’This stupid misery is only the fancy of a boy.  Wait till you get back to Castle Dare, and the rough seas, and the hard work of the stalking.  There is no sickness and sentiment on the side of Ben-an-Sloich.’  And so I was glad to come to Castle Dare, and to see the old mother, and Janet, and Hamish; and the sound of the pipes, Ogilvie—­when I heard them away in the steamer, that brought tears to my eyes; and I said to myself, ’Now you are at home again, and there will be no more nonsense of idle thinking.’  And what has it come to?  I would give everything I possess in the world to see her face once more—­ay, to be in the same town where she is.  I read the papers, trying to find out where she is.  Morning and night it is the same—­a fire, burning and burning, of impatience, and misery, and a craving just to see her face and hear her speak.”

Ogilvie did not know what to say.  There was something in this passionate confession—­in the cry wrung from a strong man, and in the rude eloquence that here and there burst from him—­that altogether drove ordinary words of counsel or consolation out of the young man’s mind.

“You have been hard hit, Macleod,” he said, with some earnestness.

“That is just it,” Macleod said, almost bitterly.  “You fire at a bird.  You think you have missed him.  He sails away as if there was nothing the matter, and the rest of the covey no doubt think he is as well as any one of them.  But suddenly you see there is something wrong.  He gets apart from the others; he towers; then down he comes, as dead as a stone.  You did not guess anything of this in London?”

“Well,” said Ogilvie, rather inclined to beat about the bush, “I thought you were paying her a good deal of attention.  But then—­she is very popular, you know, and receives a good deal of attention; and—­and the fact is, she is an uncommonly pretty girl, and I thought you were flirting a bit with her, but nothing more than that.  I had no idea it was something more serious than that.”

“Ay,” Macleod said, “if I myself had only known!  If it was a plunge—­as people talk about falling in love with a woman—­why, the next morning I would have shaken myself free of it, as a Newfoundland dog shakes himself free of the water.  But a fever, a madness, that slowly gains on you—­and you look around and say it is nothing, but day after day it burns more and more.  And it is no longer something that you can look at apart from yourself—­it is your very self; and sometimes, Ogilvie, I wonder whether it is all true, or whether it is mad I am altogether.  Newcastle—­do you know Newcastle?”