“I haven’t got a stick,” grumbled the disarmed man, and looked vaguely about the ditch.

“Perhaps,” said MacIan, politely, “you would like this one.”  With the word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick suddenly twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the other side of the road.  MacIan felt a faint stir behind him; the girl had risen to her feet and was leaning forward to stare at the fighters.  Turnbull was still engaged in countering and pommelling with the third young man.  The fourth young man was still engaged with himself, kicking his legs in helpless rotation on the back of the car and talking with melodious rationality.

At length Turnbull’s opponent began to back before the battery of his heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and boldest of the four.  If these are annals of military glory, it is due to him to say that he need not have abandoned the conflict; only that as he backed to the edge of the ditch his foot caught in a loop of grass and he went over in a flat and comfortable position from which it took him a considerable time to rise.  By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come to the rescue of MacIan, who was at bay but belabouring his two enemies handsomely.  The sight of the liberated reserve was to them like that of Blucher at Waterloo; the two set off at a sullen trot down the road, leaving even the walking-stick lying behind them in the moonlight.  MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon.  Then he approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner and pulled off his cap.

For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a wall.  That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet staringly significant, like a picture.  The white moonlight on the road, when he was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with snow.  The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen.  And he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so long been out of the picture.

In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot.  He had never really looked at a human being before in his life.  He saw her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves; then that there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair.  He might, perhaps, be excused for this hungry attention.  He had prayed that some sign might come from heaven; and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the conclusion that his one did.  The lady’s instantaneous arrest of speech might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned with the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue.  Yet it was she who remembered herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror: