CHAPTER II.
PEACE.
"The last stage now, Kit; in less than two hours we'll see Tochty woods.

The very thought makes me a boy again, and it seems yesterday that I kissed your mother on the door-step of the old lodge and went off to the Crimean war.
"That's Muirtown Castle over there in the wood--a grand place in its way, but nothing to our home, lassie.

Kilspindie--he was Viscount Hay then--joined me at Muirtown, and we fought through the weary winter.
He left the army after the war, with lots of honour.

A good fellow was Hay, both in the trenches and the messroom.
"I 've never seen him since, and I dare say he 's forgotten a battered old Indian.

Besides, he's the big swell in this district, and I 'm only a poor Hielant laird, with a wood and a tumble-down house and a couple of farms." "You are also a shameless hypocrite and deceiver, for you believe that the Carnegies are as old as the Hays, and you know that, though you have only two farms, you have twelve medals and seven wounds.