“Oh, my good dog!” she said to him as they together walked up to the gates and into the Park, “this is a very extravagant country.  You have to pay half a crown to a servant for bringing you a piece of cold pie, and then he looks as if he was not paid enough.  And Duncan, who will do everything about the house, and will give us all our dinners, it is only a pound a week he will get, and Scarlett has to be kept out of that.  And wouldn’t you like to see poor old Scarlett again?”

Bras whined as if he understood every word.

“I suppose now she is hanging out the washing on the gooseberry bushes, and you know the song she always used to sing then?  Don’t you know that Scarlett carried me about long before you were born, for you are a mere infant compared with me? and she used to sing to me—­

  Ged’ bheirte mi’ bho’n bhas so,
      Mho Sheila bheag og!

And that is what she is singing just now in the garden; and Mairi she is bringing the things out of the washing-house.  Papa is over in Stornoway this morning, arranging his accounts with the people there; and perhaps he is down at the quay, looking at the Clansman, and wondering when she is to bring me into the harbor.  The castle is all shut up, you know, with cloths over all the wonderful things, and the curtains all down, and most of the shutters shut.  Do you think papa has got my letter in his pocket, and does he read it over and over again, as I read all his letters to me over and over again?  Ah—­h!  You bad dog!”

Bras had forgotten to listen to his mistress in the excitement of seeing in the distance a large herd of deer under certain trees.  She felt by the leash that he was trembling in every limb with expectation, and straining hard on the collar.  Again and again she admonished him in vain, until she had at last to drag him away down the hill, putting a small plantation between him and the herd.  Here she found a large, umbrageous chestnut tree, with a wooden seat round its trunk, and so she sat down in the green twilight of the leaves, while Bras came and put his head in her lap.  Out beyond the shadow of the tree all the world lay bathed in sunlight, and a great silence brooded over the long undulations of the Park, where not a human being was within sight.  How strange it was, she fell to thinking, that within a short distance there were millions of men and women, while here she was absolutely alone!  Did they not care, then, for the sunlight and the trees and the sweet air?  Were they so wrapped up in those social observances that seemed to her so barren of interest?

“They have a beautiful country here,” she said, talking in a rambling and wistful way to Bras, and scarcely noticing the eager light in his eyes, as if he were trying to understand.  “They have no rain and no fog; almost always blue skies, and the clouds high up and far away.  And the beautiful trees they have too! you never saw anything like that in the Lewis, not even at Stornoway.