‘I knew it!’ cried the boy; ‘I knew he was a noble!’

And I thought the eyes of Miss Flora said the same, but more persuasively.  All through this interview she kept them on the ground, or only gave them to me for a moment at a time, and with a serious sweetness.

’You may conceive, my friends, that this is rather a painful confession,’ I continued.  ’To stand here before you, vanquished, a prisoner in a fortress, and take my own name upon my lips, is painful to the proud.  And yet I wished that you should know me.  Long after this, we may yet hear of one another—­perhaps Mr. Gilchrist and myself in the field and from opposing camps—­and it would be a pity if we heard and did not recognise.’

They were both moved; and began at once to press upon me offers of service, such as to lend me books, get me tobacco if I used it, and the like.  This would have been all mighty welcome, before the tunnel was ready.  Now it signified no more to me than to offer the transition I required.

‘My dear friends,’ I said—­’for you must allow me to call you that, who have no others within so many hundred leagues—­perhaps you will think me fanciful and sentimental; and perhaps indeed I am; but there is one service that I would beg of you before all others.  You see me set here on the top of this rock in the midst of your city.  Even with what liberty I have, I have the opportunity to see a myriad roofs, and I dare to say, thirty leagues of sea and land.  All this hostile!  Under all these roofs my enemies dwell; wherever I see the smoke of a house rising, I must tell myself that some one sits before the chimney and reads with joy of our reverses.  Pardon me, dear friends, I know that you must do the same, and I do not grudge at it!  With you, it is all different.  Show me your house then, were it only the chimney, or, if that be not visible, the quarter of the town in which it lies!  So, when I look all about me, I shall be able to say:  “There is one house in which I am not quite unkindly thought of."’

Flora stood a moment.

‘It is a pretty thought,’ said she, ’and, as far as regards Ronald and myself, a true one.  Come, I believe I can show you the very smoke out of our chimney.’

So saying, she carried me round the battlements towards the opposite or southern side of the fortress, and indeed to a bastion almost immediately overlooking the place of our projected flight.  Thence we had a view of some foreshortened suburbs at our feet, and beyond of a green, open, and irregular country rising towards the Pentland Hills.  The face of one of these summits (say two leagues from where we stood) is marked with a procession of white scars.  And to this she directed my attention.