And now a great silence fell over these three; and Janet Macleod looked anxiously toward the old lady, who sat unmoved in the face of the ordeal through which she knew she must pass.  It was an old custom that each night a pibroch should be played in Castle Dare in remembrance of her five slain sons; and yet on this one night her niece would fain have seen that custom abandoned.  For was not the pibroch the famous and pathetic “Cumhadh na Cloinne,” the Lament for the Children, that Patrick Mor, one of the pipers of Macleod of Skye, had composed to the memory of his seven sons, who had all died within one year?  And now the doors were opened, and the piper boy once more entered.  The wild, sad wail arose:  and slow and solemn was the step with which he walked up the hall.  Lady Macleod sat calm and erect, her lips proud and firm, but her lean hands were working nervously together; and at last, when the doors were closed on the slow and stately and mournful Lament for the Children, she bent down the silvery head on those wrinkled hands and wept aloud.  Patrick Mor’s seven brave sons could have been no more to him than her six tall lads had been to her; and now the last of them was going away from her.

“Do you know,” said Janet, quickly, to her cousin across the table, “that it is said no piper in the West Highlands can play ’Lord Lovat’s Lament’ like our Donald?”

“Oh yes, he plays it very well; and he has got a good step,” Macleod said.  “But you will tell him to play no more Laments to-night.  Let him take to strathspeys if any of the lads come up after bringing back the boat.  It will be time enough for him to make a Lament for me when I am dead.  Come, mother, have you no message for Norman Ogilvie?”

The old lady had nerved herself again, though her hands were still trembling.

“I hope he will come back with you, Keith,” she said.

“For the shooting?  No, no, mother.  He was not fit for the shooting about here:  I have seen that long ago.  Do you think he could lie for an hour in a wet bog?  It was up at Fort William I saw him last year, and I said to him, ‘Do you wear gloves at Aldershot?’ His hands were as white as the hands of a woman.”

“It is no woman’s hand you have, Keith,” his cousin said; “it is a soldier’s hand.”

“Yes,” said he, with his face flushing, “and if I had had Norman Ogilvie’s chance—­”

But he paused.  Could he reproach this old dame, on the very night of his departure, with having disappointed all those dreams of military service and glory that are almost the natural inheritance of a Macleod of the Western Highlands?  If he was a stay-at-home, at least his hands were not white.  And yet, when young Ogilvie and he studied under the same tutor—­the poor man had to travel eighteen miles between the two houses, many a time in hard weather—­all the talk and aspirations of the boys were about a soldier’s life; and Macleod could show his friend the various trophies, and curiosities sent home by his elder brothers from all parts of the world.  And now the lily-fingered and gentle-natured Ogilvie was at Aldershot; while he—­what else was he than a mere deer-stalker and salmon-killer?