"You will not believe her," said Miss White, in that low-toned, gravely
sincere voice of hers, while a faint shell-like pink suffused her face.
"It was only that we were talking of the highlands, because we
understood you were coming; and Mrs. Ross was trying to make out"--and
here a spice of proud mischief came into her ordinarily calm eyes--"she
was trying to make out that you must be a very terrible and dangerous
person, who would probably murder us all if we were not civil to you."

"Well, you know, Sir Keith," said Mrs. Ross, apologetically, "you
acknowledge yourself that you Macleods were a very dreadful lot of
people at one time. What a shame it was to track the poor fellow over
the snow, and then deliberately to put brushwood in front of the cave,
and then suffocate whole two hundred persons at once!"

"Oh yes, no doubt!" said he; "but the Macdonalds were asked first to
give up the men that had bound the Macleods hand and foot and set them
adrift in the boat, and they would not do it. And if the Macdonalds had
got the Macleods into a cave, they would have suffocated them too. The
Macdonalds began it."

"Oh, no, no, no," protested Mrs. Ross; "I can remember better than that.
What were the Macleods about on the island at all when they had to be
sent off, tied hand and foot, in their boats?"

"And what is the difference between tying a man hand and foot and
putting him out in the Atlantic, and suffocating him in a cave? It was
only by an accident that the wind drifted them over to Skye."

"I shall begin to fear that you have some of the old blood in you," said