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"Under what hallucination can the poor old man be labouring?" thought Roland, as he sat alone in the stately dining-room—a veritable hall—and thought how proud he who was about to pass away to a dark and narrow home, had been of Ardgowrie and all its details and surroundings—its stately park where the deer made their lair among the green ferns, its dark blue loch full of pike, and the pine plantations where the pheasant pea-fowl were thick as the cones that lay around them.

Daily by the sun, nightly by the moon, for many centuries, had the same shadows of the quaint old house been cast on the same places, and it was now an epitome of a proud historic past. It had entertained more than one king of Scotland, and everything in the old mansion was on a grand scale, from the portraits by Jamesone and Vandyck (who married a Ruthven of Gowrie, by the way) to the massive cups won in many a race that glittered on the sideboard. Above the latter, a splendid full-length of the "bonnie Earl" who was wont to flirt with Anne of Denmark in Falkland Woods, and who on the 5th of August, 1600, perished in the famous conspiracy, had its place of honour; and among other portraits of later times, was one by Sir Watson Gordon of the present proprietor, in his uniform as a field officer of the Royal Scots.