Through narrow crooked streets, with many dark courts on each side, he came to the open road which connected the two towns.

It was a starry night, dusky rather than dark, and full of the long sound of the distant sea-waves falling on the shore beyond the _links_.

He was striding along whistling, and thinking about as nearly nothing as might be, when the figure of a man, whose footsteps he had heard coming through the gloom, suddenly darkened before him and stopped.

It was a little spare, slouching figure, but what the face was like, he could not see.
"Whustlin' ?" said the man, interrogatively.
"Ay; what for no ?" answered Alec cheerily.
"Haud yer een aff o' rainbows, or ye'll brak' yer shins upo' gravestanes," said the man, and went on, with a shuffling gait, his eyes flashing on Alec, from under projecting brows, as he passed.
Alec concluded him drunk, although drink would not altogether account for the strangeness of the address, and soon forgot him.

The arch echoed to his feet as he entered the dark quadrangle, across which a glimmer in the opposite tower guided him to the stairs leading up to the place of meeting.