It had been a place all his own; secret from every one, even from Mark, his companion during all those holidays that he had spent at Inverashiel. Somehow, David told Juliet--and it was a confidence he had seldom before imparted to anyone--he had never quite managed to hit it off with Mark. He couldn't say why, exactly. No doubt it was his own fault; but there was no accounting for one's likes and dislikes.

And with quick regret at having betrayed his carefully suppressed feelings in regard to his cousin, David had laughed apologetically, and spoken of other things.

Here, then, just as the steamer Rob Roy was drawing close to the wooden landing-stage at the edge of the loch, with Julia Romaninov still standing in the bows; here, because she had once been to this place with him, because without her he had so often sat upon these mossy roots, came Juliet to dream of her love.

Like him, she seated herself against the tree trunk at the giddy brink of the precipitous rock; like him, her eyes rested on the smooth waters below her, or on the far-away misty distance where Crianan slumbered; but, unlike him, her eyes, as they looked, were filled with tears. Where was he now? Oh, David, poor unjustly treated David! In what narrow cell, lighted only by a high, iron-barred window--for so the scene shaped itself in her mind--with uncovered floor of stone, bare walls and a bench to lie on, was the man she loved wearing away his days under the burden of so frightful an accusation?