Lady Juliana, not understanding a word he said, sat silently wondering at her husband’s curiosity respecting such a wretched-looking place.

“Impossible! you must be mistaken, my lad:  why, what’s become of all the fine wood that used to surround it?”

“Gin you mean a wheen auld firs, there’s some of them to the fore yet,” pointing to two or three tall, bare, scathed Scotch firs, that scarcely bent their stubborn heads to the wind, that now began to howl around them.

“I insist upon it that you are mistaken; you must have wandered from the right road,” cried the now alarmed Douglas in a loud voice, which vainly attempted to conceal his agitation.

“We’ll shune see that,” replied the phlegmatic Scot, who, having rested his horses and affixed a drag to the wheel, was about to proceed, when Lady Juliana, who now began to have some vague suspicion of the truth, called to him to stop, and, almost breathless with alarm, inquired of her husband the meaning of what had passed.

He tried to force a smile, as he said, “It seems our journey is nearly ended; that fellow persists in asserting that that is Glenfern, though I can scarcely think it.  If it is, it is strangely altered since I left it twelve years ago.”

For a moment Lady Juliana was too much alarmed to make a reply; pale and speechless, she sank back in the carriage; but the motion of it, as it began to proceed, roused her to a sense of her situation, and she burst into tears and exclamations.

The driver, who attributed it all to fears at descending the hill, assured her she need na be the least feared, for there were na twa cannier beasts atween that and Johnny Groat’s hoose; and that they wad ha’e her at the castle door in a crack, gin they were ance down the brae.”

Douglas’s attempts to soothe his high-born bride were not more successful than those of the driver:  in vain he made use of every endearing epithet and tender expression, and recalled the time when she used to declare that she could dwell with him in a desert; her only replies were bitter reproaches and upbraidings for his treachery and deceit, mingled with floods of tears, and interrupted by hysterical sobs.  Provoked at her folly, yet softened by her extreme distress, Douglas was in the utmost state of perplexity—­now ready to give way to a paroxysm of rage; then yielding to the natural goodness of his heart, he sought to soothe her into composure; and, at length, with much difficulty succeeded in changing her passionate indignation into silent dejection.

That no fresh objects of horror or disgust might appear to disturb this calm, the blinds were pulled down, and in this state they reached Glenfern Castle.  But there the friendly veil was necessarily with drawn, and the first object that presented itself to the highbred Englishwoman was an old man clad in a short tartan coat and striped woollen night-cap, with blear eyes and shaking hands, who vainly strove to open the carriage door.