66 They hurried along in silence a little way, and then she stopped short in increased dismay. "I thought I knew the road so well, and now I believe I have brought you out of it already. Oh! I wish you had come with a better guide!" she reproached herself bitterly. No, do not say anything against it, for you do not know the risk you run. I should not have undertaken to lead you up, even so far as Lochbuy, in such weather. I ought not to have consented, for I did not like the appearance of the mountain all the morning. But it is too late to speak of that. We must have strayed out of the line we followed in climbing, when we were gathering the foxgloves. And now I dare not go down at random. There is nothing for it but to retrace our steps as far as the edge of the wood, unless, indeed, we hit upon one of the watercourses, which would be our best chance, and let it direct us." They turned their faces, and lo! the white cloud which had fallen was at their back, and the lighter mist wreaths were floating all around or scudding past them, to become dim rack in the valleys. The rising wind had been blowing dankly upon them, though they had hardly felt it since they commenced their hasty descent. But now a chillness so intense that it pierced to the marrow, like nothing in life except the touch of the dead, came upon them. In a moment the gloss on Unah's auburn hair grew dim as it hung dripping in her neck. Their very eyelashes were beaded with moisture, which filled the eyes and blurred the sight. If either of them had been weak of chest there would have been a weight as of iron on the breast, and a painful griping clutch at the throat. As it was, though these wayfarers were young and strong, their breath grew labored; they staggered a little dizzily as they strove to recover the lost ground. Instinctively Frank Tempest had caught firm hold of Unah's hand, as he would have clutched her sinking in a sea, and he clasped it tightly as they fought their way through the soaked heather and watery air. There were not many yards to go, but the pair took many minutes to traverse the space, and they found, when they regained the outlying sentries of the birch wood, that they must have come back by a circuitous "I believe we had better wait here for a few minutes," said Unah, with some tremulousness in her voice; "I told you the mist was not only wetting and tiring, it was crazing" she made a desperate attempt to find something to smile at in their mistake" and then we must try and reach the bothie- I do not know that it is right to venture farther. Perhaps the mist will roll off soon I have seen it pass away in half an hour. But that was in spring or summer, not in autumn," she concluded, with a sigh of apprehension. "I should not mind a bit," protested Frank Tempest stoutly; "it would only be a little adventure on my part that I should boast of all my life afterwards in England, where we are not lucky in meeting with adventures often, as I have frequently told you - if it were not for you, Miss Macdonald. You are wearied out," he said, with an unconscious inflection of tender concern in his tones; "you are wet through already" he touched her light jacket with a mixture of reverence and remorse. "I must do something after we get back to the bothie. Look here, can you stay alone in this kettle of steam for a little while, and let me run down? I'll manage to make out the way somehow, and get help. I'll bring you up a lot of plaids and shawls and an umbrella at least. Do give me leave, it will be another feather in my cap, you know," urged Frank in his growing excitement. He had only a faint idea of the danger he would brave in his enterprise, but he had a lively impression of the deprivation he was about to inflict on himself in another sense. He was going to leave her and shorten the time they were to be alone on the mountain together whether in sunshine or in mist mattered little to him, in his exalted frame of mind. But he would brace himself manfully to accomplish the sacrifice for her sake. "No, indeed! Unah refused very decidedly and a little indignantly. "It is I who should have known better than to have brought you into this difficulty. Would you have me send you down to encounter worse dangers on my account?" "Is it for that you care? Is it of me you think?" he cried softly, with a glow in his eyes and a warmth on his lips in the midst of the bitter cold. At his words she shrank from him with a quick, piteous appeal in her eyes that struck him dumb, even while it vexed and chafed him. She made a great effort to rally from her distress and change the subject. She looked at the foxgloves still hanging over his arm, and which had be- | with him. It is like committing folly in a come limp and sodden within the short church, and turning God's house into interval since they were pulled. "I have heard," she said with another small yet courageous essay at pleasantry, "that there is ill luck in plucking a wild white rose for a gift. And I have always wondered why, unless because it was Prince Charlie's badge-it seemed such an innocent flower. But I begin to believe there is a malignant influence in white foxgloves. Look, they have the green tinge of envy and poison in their flowers. They are associated with the 'good people'-you remember we talked of whether or not we should affront them before we set out?" But his pulses were throbbing and his blood coursing far beyond all gentle restraint. He was not going to recross the Rubicon, which he had just passed, by violence done to himself. If he had been older he would surely have spared the woman he loved when she was in his power, from a declaration that was little short of an insult to her in her position, and which would wring her tender heart. For he was naturally honest and kind as he was bold and ardent; but he was hardly a man, little more than a rash, hot-headed boy- a spoilt boy to boot. "I don't bear any grudge against the foxgloves," he said, a little resentfully and with a shade of sulkiness," nor for that matter against the mist, since they have brought and kept us together. Unah my Unah!" he exclaimed in the recklessness of passion, drawing nearer to her. "Oh, no, no!" denied Unah in terror and distress, putting out her hands as if to thrust him from her. "Do not say such words, Mr. Tempest. It is very wrong. I am to be Donald Drumchatt's. His house is preparing for me to stay in as his wife. You know-you must have known all the while." "I heard something of a formal contract, a family agreement," he admitted with dogged reluctance, “but it cannot be put in force. It is not to come between us -it sha'n't stand." "And who is to prevent it?" demanded Unah, always more shocked and speaking almost wildly. "I have given my word. Am I to break it? Would I fail Don, whom I have known all my days - who has been fond of me ever since I was a child, and who needs me so much? It is cruel and wicked to imagine such behavior - in such a place at such a time, when I used to think the mountain must have looked like this when He stood on it, and Moses and Elijah came down and talked worse than a place of merchandise - a den of thieves. Be quiet, Mr. Tempest, or I shall be tempted to bid you leave me, and perhaps meet your death- and you so young, and when we have been such friends," lamented Unah wofully. But his proposal to leave her had been already rejected; the time for it was past. And he would not be quiet. He would press his suit in season or out of season, not so much with humility - - he had that to learn in a great measure as with youthful confidence and daring self-assertion. "Better break your word than keep it in the letter, and be false to it in the spirit," asserted Frank. "Better fail one man, who had no right to take advantage of you as a child, than make three people miserable, though one of them is yourself and you may think you have a right to do what you will with yourself; that is just like a romantic girl," said Frank, adopting an accent of boyish superiority even at that moment. "Nobody need be long miserable if they do what is right," objected Unah faintly, and with more regard to the sense than the grammatical construction of her sentence. "Should we not aim for the bothie now, although we have quarrelled?" suggested Frank with an air of affront, whether at his own words or at hers. She sought to comply in silence, but her limbs were trembling, her heart was sick, and when she advanced beyond the protection of the trees into the seething whirlpool of vapor that was beyond, she began to grope like a blind creature, and to stumble as if she would fall every instant. "Oh dear!" she cried in despair, “I do not know where to turn, or whether the bothie is on my right hand or my left." He had sense enough remaining to see that she was in no condition to proceed. He drew her back beneath the shelter of the trees. "Never mind," he said soothingly and penitently, since his heart smote him for the consequences of his wilfulness; "we'll wait a little longer till you have recovered, and I will not say another word to vex or plague you, if you'll only forgive and trust me again." He found a heap of leaves and withered bracken less wet than the other heaps, and induced her to sit down, as she was no longer fit to stand. In truth her teeth had begun to chatter and she was shivering from head to foot in spite of herself. She looked forlorn and prostrated very unlike the Unah Macdonald who was only timid and helpless to the world without, but in the inner circle which he had penetrated, showed herself brave, cheery, and full of expedient. He took her benumbed hands and chafed them in his own, which still retained some warmth, and she could not bid him desist. He begged her pardon humbly, over and over again, and she was not able to tell him to have done. Her pale face seemed to him to have grown as wan and shadowy in the mist, as the face of the moon when she rises in the sky before the sun has set. She appeared to be paying no heed to what was passing around her, and to be lapsing into stupor as people do who are exposed beyond their strength in a snowstorm, or in intense cold. She was like the lover of one of her songs The frost it was keen, and his heart it grew weary, And he lay down to sleep on the moorland sae dreary. Possibly she had not vigor left to fight- stupid," referring to her shyness, "and "No!" she refused absolutely to believe so incredible a statement, shaking her head. "And if we get down safely after all, you will go back to England, enter on the great possessions they speak of, and forget all about me. And it will be right," she said with firmness. "Never," he cried angrily. "What do you take me for, Unah? A fickle lad? A man sure to be forsworn?" "Among the many songs I sang to you and Donald," she answered him with a faint smile, "did I never sing to you of what befel the poor Highland lassies on Athole Green, when the lads, who had thought so much of them-only because they knew no better- were dancing with the English girls in Carlisle Ha'?" 66 "No," he answered proudly, "and I don't care. They were Highlanders, I suppose," he was still petulant enough to add, "and have nothing to do with me." There was silence again between them, while the griping, searching cold began to Half an hour before he had smiled in-weigh even on his heart and tongue. He credulously in his light-heartedness, as to there being anything seriously alarming in a north country fog overtaking a seasoned captain in cricket games and stroke-oar in boat-races, with his mistress in his charge, on a Scotch mountain. But when it came to the pinch, he lost entire command of himself. He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them fondly to melt the frost in them. He said aloud they two were alone together on the mountain, and very likely the mist would last for days and nights, and they would indeed perish thus together, far from the rest of the world, without either its aid or its interference. And he could accept the portion rather than they should live to be parted. She was to be his and not Donald Drumchatt's. God was going to be kinder to him than she had meant to be, and had decreed that in death they should not be divided. At his frantic words she suddenly roused herself, sat straight up, and looked in his face with her heavy eyes. "Did you care for me so much as that?" she asked in doubtful wonder, as if she were a third person listening to a story which was ended. "It was strange, and I such a mere Highland girl, so struggled against its mastery, and if a proof had been wanted that his mad, youthful passion was singularly deep and strong, reaching well-nigh to the roots of his being, there existed one in the fact that it was still uppermost in his thoughts. cau "Unah," he assailed her again tiously this time, and she had got used to the employment of her Christian name by him till she heard it without protest and as a matter of course; they had been a pair of friends for weeks, and they had become fellow sufferers at last "do you think if the mist lasts and we cannot make our way down, that we shall not be able to survive a long exposure to it?" "I do not know," she hesitated; "but we will trust in God," she added in her reverent, wistful way. "They must guess our plight at Fearnavoil. My mother will know what detains us so long, for she sent us here; and my father," she said the names with little gasps, "will strive to rescue us. But they are almost sure to think that we have taken refuge in the bothie. Now I am not certain that we are not on the other side of the wood, so that even though they get so far, they may still miss us." "Not if I shouted?". "You cannot tell when to shout, and the | What shall I do? Would it be a comfort continuous effort would help to exhaust to you for me to say - what I have never you; you could only try it at intervals, and dreamed of or confessed to myself to this I am not sure whether they would hear day—and though nothing could ever have you at Lochbuy Farm. We are young,' come of it- that I care for you, who, till she began again after an instant's pause this summer, were a stranger to me, and who in a few weeks would have gone away and never seen me again, more than for poor Don whom I have known all my days, and who was to have been my husband, but who must live on now as he can at Drumchatt without his cousin? If there is sin in the words, how shall I keep from saying them?" a mere boy and girl, everybody called us a few days ago," she reminded him, with a momentary rueful sense of the hardness of their fate if they were doomed to die then "but we have not had food for a number of hours, and I am worn out already. Several years ago a stranger living at the Ford Inn, as you have been doing, was rash enough to climb the mountain without a guide. The mist came down when he was nearer the foot than we are, but he never got any farther in the direction of the pass or the valley. People judged that he must have wandered in a circle for hours, and then lain down where he was found in the morning, not a hundred yards from one of the shepherd's cottages, if he had only known it," she ended with a sighing shudder. "If we have so little chance left," he urged, "before we give up all thought of life and prepare to die, would there be any great disloyalty to him in your telling me that you could have cared for me if he had not been in the way, when I have loved you better than life, my darling, so that if you gave me one kiss I think I should die content?" "Oh, Frank," she cried, thrilling him with the sound of his name that burst from her lips in her eagerness, "would it not be a bad beginning in making our peace with God, to let our last act be one of treachery to those who trusted in us?" "It would not be treachery to be true to our love. You could not think so if you really cared for me," he said moodily. It was his turn to be generous and to comfort her. "God bless you, Unah," he said softly, "I will ask no more. I believe now you care for me, though I was too late- that was not our fault- and nothing might have come of it. I am happy do you hear me say it, Unah? happy as a king at this moment; and I can trust that God not only forgives us, but that he lets us have this single taste of happiness which was not for us. When it is nearly over, you will lay your head on my shoulder and let me hold your hand, and die as you might have died had you been my wife. Then I shall not care to live, or that the searchers should find me, until I am lying dead by your side." But even as Frank uttered his tender adjuration, a muffled shout sounded through the mist. Both of them heard it; and though he was so startled that he could not at the moment reply, it was followed by another and a nearer shout, accompa nied by the barking of dogs. She was the first to be recalled to the world of everyday life that had been left behind them, and of which they felt they had taken farewell. It was with a strange sense of perturbation, almost of pain, as when one is "Oh, Frank, Frank!" she cried again, recalled from a swoon, and with a distress"do you believe I do not care for you being consciousness of self-betrayal, that she cause I care more for your honor and your highest good?" Then she broke down in another direction: she wrung her hands and made that involuntary motion common to deepest sorrow, of rocking herself to and fro. "It is I who brought you here to die," she said more to herself than to him, "and you were so young and brave and bonnie, like the heroes of my songs. You might have been happy if you had never come to Fearnavoil. But you came, and liked us all so well-liked me far too well. Oh! if I could only get you to leave me and save yourself, if I did not know that by going away from me you might die a speedier, more terrible death-dashed against the boulders! What shall I do? awoke to the approach of deliverance. But, young and simple woman as she was, she gathered herself up, and drew swiftly around her again the cloak of reserve, with the instinct of self-preservation, and of the maintenance of a sacred privacy, which is so strong even in the most candid of single-hearted and pure-minded women, as to amaze the men who have most faith in them, and to draw down on them from cynics the charge of inveterate hypocrisy and guile. "Listen!" she said to Frank Tempest, speaking almost as quietly in her reawakened hope as if the last two or three hours they had spent together had been blotted out. "It is my father with some of the shepherds. They have taken the precau- | had only power to say, "Wrap me in your tion to bring with them young Ghillie and | plaid, father, to make me warm again; put the collies. And the dogs are scenting us your arm round me to hold me up, and I out." Unah was right. The next moment the dogs, headed by the yellow terrier of famous descent, emerged, leaping and giving tongue joyously, as if from the clouds, soon to be followed by the tall figure of the minister and his stalwart assistants. "Thank God, here they are!" cried the minister. "Unah, lassie, what possessed you to take to the mountain on a day like this? I thought you knew better." The worthy man reproached his daughter the moment he found her safe. Even his goodness and gentleness did not exempt him from the feelings of his kind in an inclination to scold a little when his anxiety was relieved, partly as a protest against a waste of feeling, partly to prevent the most distant chance of a scene. "We wanted foxgloves for Lady Jean. I thought the mist might keep off, or that we should get down before it came," said Unah briefly, her teeth beginning to chatter again, now that the high pressure of violent emotion was removed from her. "I am the principal offender, Mr. Macdonald," Frank said, recovering his habitual boldness, and coming with his wonted alacrity to the front. "Lady Jean sent me, and I persuaded Miss Macdonald to come out with me." "Say no more about it, sir;" the minister dismissed the subject somewhat drily, making a mental note to himself, "I thought that was a nice lad, but he must be an unmitigated puppy to suppose that he was of any consequence in the matter. "Here, Unah, drink this, every drop, instantly," he said, carefully pouring out a certain measure from his flask, and speaking in a voice of authority, as if he were administering a nauseous drug on which depended the gravest results. "You had better have the rest, Mr. Tempest," he forced himself to add more heartily, yet with a touch of sarcasm, "unless you wish to carry off an exploded ague or a rheumatic fever as a reminiscence of the Highlands." It was plain that Frank Tempest's share in the expedition rankled in the minister's mind, disturbing its friendliness, and that there was great danger of the promising pupil in natural history undergoing an eclipse in his senior's good graces. But the individuals most concerned were incapable of studying the thermometer of a third person's manner. Unah was the calmest, but even Unah think I shall find strength to go down." Then she looked round to the biggest of the shepherds, "Charlie, let Mr. Tempest hold by your arm, for he is so stiff that his feet will not feel the ground beneath him; no wonder, for we have been dead and are alive again," she added, in a lower tone, as if her mind were slightly confused, so that she mistook the clause of the verse she quoted. From The Spectator. MR. RUSKIN'S SOCIETY. [We give this account from a friend to the scheme, as of a certain intellectual interest. We pass no criticism on what may be called a dream of fair living.-ED. Spectator.] MR. RUSKIN'S Guild of St. George has held its first "chapter," and one of the most thoroughly English towns in England has been the scene of it. Perhaps very few, besides readers of "Fors Clavigera,' have been aware that the great prose poet to whose genius we owe the debt of a new and noble impulse in art, and one of the cardinal points in whose teaching has always been the interdependence between the artistic and moral energy of a nation, has for a long time endeavored to put his protest against, what he holds to be, the evil influences of the age, in the most practical form possible, namely, a society of which the actual working should be in direct and visible opposition to them. Those who accepted his teaching were asked to contribute, according to their ability, towards the obtaining land in England, within the limits of which, subject to existing laws, an example might be set, firstly, of the right relations between landlord and tenant, master and servant; secondly, of the best education of the young, or indeed we may as well say, of the most excellent discipline and training of old and young; and thirdly, of the wisest and most beneficial use of the ground, by cultivation, for the most part, but sometimes by careful neglect, where great natural beauty, or other reasons, made such neglect desirable. It may sound strange, but moneys and land have been given to a society formed for this purpose. "Companions," not many, it must be confessed, have been enrolled, and their first meeting was held the other day in Birmingham! It was, we have been told, a perfectly matter-of-fact |