“Long years ago it must have been when I was but a little child—­my father was sitting alone over the fire in our home at Inverawe; a wild, strange place that I love as I love no other spot on earth.  He was in the great hall, and, suddenly there came a knocking at the door, loud and imperative.  He opened, and there stood a man without, wild and dishevelled, who told how he had slain a man in a fray, and was flying from his pursuers.

“‘Give me help and shelter!’ he implored; and my father drew him in and closed the door, and promised to hide him.  ’Swear on your dirk not to give me up!’ he implored; and my father swore, though with him his word was ever his bond.  He hid the fugitive in a secret place, and hardly had he done so before there was another loud knocking at the door.

“This time it was the pursuers, hot on the track of the murderer.  ‘He has slain your cousin Donald,’ they told him.  ’He cannot be far away.  We are hunting for him.  Can you help us?’ My father was in a great strait; but he remembered his oath, and though he sent out servants to help in the search, he would not give up to justice the man who had trusted him.”

“And he was right,” said Lord Howe quickly; “I honour and respect him for that.”

“It may be so, yet it is against the traditions of our house and race,” answered Alexander gravely; “and that night my father woke suddenly from a troubled dream to see the ghost of his murdered kinsman standing at his bedside.  The spectre spoke to him in urgent tones: 

“’Inverawe, Inverawe, blood has been shed; shield not the murderer!’

“Unable to sleep, my father rose, and went to the fugitive and told him he could not shelter him longer.  ‘You swore on your dirk!’ replied the miserable man; and my father, admitting the oath not to betray him, led him away in the darkness and hid him in a mountain cave known to hardly any save himself.

“That night once more the spectre came and spoke the same words, ‘Inverawe, Inverawe, blood has been shed; shield not the murderer!’ The vision troubled my father greatly.  At daybreak he went once more to the cave; but the man was gone—­whither he never knew.  He went home, and again upon the third night the ghostly figure stood beside him; but this time he was less stern of voice and aspect.

“He spoke these words, ’Farewell, Inverawe; farewell, till we meet at Ticonderoga.’  Then it vanished, and he has never seen it since.”

“Ticonderoga!” repeated Lord Howe, and looked steadily at Alexander, who proceeded: 

“That was the word.  My father had never heard it before.  The sound of it was so strange that he wrote it down; and when I was a youth of perhaps seventeen summers, and had become a companion to him, he told me the whole story, and we pondered together as to what and where Ticonderoga could be.  Years had passed since he saw the vision, and he had never heard the name from that day.  I had not heard it either—­then.”