from my uncle, written before Christmas, one from Alexander Jardine, written a month later.  My uncle’s contained the information that, lacking my immediate return to this island and the political faith of his side of the house, I was no longer his nephew and heir.  The laird of Glenfernie, upon an old quarrel into which I need not enter, chose to send me a challenge simply. Meet him, on such a sands in Holland....  Well, great affairs have right of way over small ones!  Under the circumstances, he might as well have appointed a plain in the moon!  The duel waits....  I tell you what I know of home affairs.  I shall be obliged for any information you may have that I have not.”

Mr. Wotherspoon’s sharp blue eyes seemed to consider it.  He drummed on the table.  “I am a much older man than you, Captain Rullock, and an old adviser of your family.  Perhaps I may speak without offense?  That subject of quarrel, now, between you and the laird of Glenfernie—­”

The other made a movement, impatient and imperious.  “It is not likely, sir, that he divulged that!”

“He?  No!  But fate—­fortune—­the unrolling course of things—­plain Providence—­whatever you choose to call it—­seems at times quite below or above that reticence which we others so naturally prize and exhibit!”

“You’ll oblige me, sir, by not speaking in riddles.”

The irony dropped from Mr. Wotherspoon’s tone.  He faced the business squarely.  “Do you mean to say that you do not know of the suicide of Elspeth Barrow?”

The chair opposite made a grating sound, pushed violently back upon the bare, polished floor.  Down the street, through the window, came the sound of Cluny Macpherson’s pipers, playing down from the Lawnmarket.  Rullock seemed to have thrust his chair back into the shadow.  Out of it came presently his voice, low and hoarse: 

“No.”

“They found her on Christmas Day—­drowned in the Kelpie’s Pool.  Self-murder—­murder also of a child that would have been.”

Again silence.  The lawyer found that he must go through with it, having come so far.  “It seems that there is a cripple fellow of the neighborhood who had stumbled, unseen, upon your trysts.  He told—­spoke it all out to the crowd gathered.  There was a letter, too, upon her which gave a clue.  But she never named you and evidently meant not to name you....  Poor child!  She may have thought herself strong, and then things have come over her wave on wave.  Her grandfather—­that dark upbringing on tenets harsh and wrathful—­certainty of disgrace.  Pitiful!”

There came a sound from the chair pushed back from the light.  Mr. Wotherspoon measured the table with his fingers.

“It seems that the countryside was searching for her.  It was the laird of Glenfernie who, alone and coming upon some trace, entered the Kelpie’s Pool and found her there.  They say that he carried her, dead, in his arms through the glen to White Farm.”