"Is that Loquhariot!" asked Sallie.

The weatherly little steamer on which she had been travelling along that wonderful coast since leaving the train had just rounded a high, bluff headland and all at once opened out the wide waters of Loch Jura, mirror-like in the still afternoon among the frowning mountains about them. Mr. Jobling and Slyne were with her on the bridge. Captain Dove strolled up at that moment, his hands in his pockets, his soft felt hat on the back of his head, a cigar cocked between his teeth at an equally rakish angle. Sallie was staring straight ahead, with wide, apprehensive eyes.

"Is that Loquhariot!" she asked again, almost in a whisper, as she gazed helplessly at the high battlements of the ancient stronghold which looks from its lofty promontory down the whole length of the loch, unchanged in its seaward face since the date of its building. Even Captain Dove was impressed by the picture it made.

"That\'s your Castle of Loquhariot, Lady Josceline," Mr. Jobling at length replied, and went on to tell her its history, learned from the guide-book and locally when he had been there before.

The Castle of Loquhariot dates back to the sixteenth century. But for long ere that, a squat, four-square fortalice had occupied its site. Legend has it that the grim, grey keep which to-day covers the whole surface of what was then a high rocky island but is now a mere peninsula of the mainland, was first conceived in the mind of the then Lord Jura, a plain Scots baron of piratical tendencies, who had brought back from the Spanish Main—whither he had sailed in the company of another of the same kidney as himself, one Francis Drake—a veritable shipload of doubloons and pieces-of-eight; and that its ramparts had first been armed and manned, in haste, when the remains of the Great Armada came drifting southward from Cape Wrath on its hapless way home to Spain, after that same Francis Drake had done with it.

To-day, at any rate, may be seen in more than one of the embrasures on those ramparts, some culverin or falconet salved from the wreck of a great galleon which went to pieces on the Small Isles, at the mouth of the loch. And in a little graveyard on the smallest of the Small Isles stands a weather-beaten stone which says that round about it lie buried the bones of a great mort of Spaniards there interred by their sworn enemies in August, A. D. 1588.

It must undoubtedly have cost at least a shipload of doubloons to build the castle. But the then baron did not build it all, for there are towers and wings and bastions added, on the landward side, during the next two centuries; whose cost would seem to show that his piratical lordship did not leave his descendants quite penniless. The circular North Keep alone—where the billiard-room is nowadays—must undoubtedly have cost its imaginative progenitor a small fortune.

The whole edifice, as it now stands, is a monument, apparently imperishable, to the greatness and grandeur, past, present, and to come, of the Jura family. And Sallie, staring at it with wide, apprehensive eyes, from the bridge of the busy little coaster, listening to Mr. Jobling\'s descriptive quotations, with Captain Dove of the Olive Branch, and Jasper Slyne for company, felt infinitely dispirited by the knowledge that she and none other was the present representative of that proud race.

The steamer drew in toward the anchorage and a ferryboat put off from the shore to meet it. The kilted Highlandmen therein looked askance at Ambrizette and crossed themselves quite openly as she was handed down into it from the gangway. Slyne followed and held out his arms to Sallie, but she needed no such assistance. And the men in the boat seemed better content after a glance or two at her as she sat down and slipped a warm arm around Ambrizette, who was shivering in the winter afternoon.

The two remaining travellers jumped in, the baggage was transshipped, and the steamer swung about on her way to the farther north. The captain sounded his steam-whistle and waved his cap in parting salute as the ferry made its slow way ashore to the further accompaniment of a dirge-like chorus from the crew at its heavy sweeps; at which music Captain Dove snorted his disgust very audibly. He had awoke with a headache and had been in a bad temper all day.

By the way Slyne held a low-toned conversation with Mr. Jobling. And when the big boat was at length beached beside a rude pier, he paid the ferryman liberally, distributed some small change among the oarsmen, and bade them bring the baggage along to the little inn on the roadside at a short distance.

"Better send Ambrizette with me," he said to Sallie, and the black dwarf trotted off after him in obedience to a few words from her mistress, while Mr. Jobling turned the other way, toward the Castle.

"We\'ll just have time to see over the old place before it\'s dark, Lady Josceline," the lawyer explained, and Sallie followed him with Captain Dove.

Slyne rejoined them before they were half-way up the long hill on the road which leads from the shore-level to the plateau. Sallie was still staring with troubled eyes at the huge, picturesque, rambling pile which seemed to grow always more immense as they drew nearer to it. It dwarfed into proportions almost infinitesimal the cluster of white cottages nestling cosily at the base of the great rock which formed its foundation. It seemed to dominate the whole visible world, to challenge even the mighty mountains which shut it in with the sea.

"That\'s the water-gate," Mr. Jobling mentioned and pointed out a black, oblong opening in the cliff-face at some height above even high-water mark and protected against possible intrusion by a heavy iron grating whose bars must have been as thick as a grown man\'s wrist. "I suppose the sea would be right up to its sill when the place was built.

"There\'s an underground passage connecting it with the interior of the castle, and they\'d no doubt use that a good deal in the old days.

"And this is the North Keep, as it\'s called; newer, you\'ll maybe notice, than the west frontage, although it looks just as ancient. We\'ll soon have the Jura house-flag afloat again from the Warder\'s Tower, Lady Josceline, and the beacon-fire alight after dark. It always burns at night, you know, when the head of the family\'s in residence—a custom dating back to the days when there were no other lights on the coast.

"You\'ll see the moat now. Long ago it was always full, even at low tide. But now it\'s as dry as—"

"As I am!" grumbled Captain Dove, spitting down into the deep fosse which had formerly cut the castle off from the mainland but is now no more than an empty ravine spanned by an ornate drawbridge of modern date.

They crossed that, their footsteps producing an eerie clank on the planking, and came to a halt before the main entrance, over whose heavy, iron-studded oak doors still hung, a mute reminder of more stormy times, a massive portcullis armed with chevaux-de-frise of long, pointed spikes.

Slyne rang the electric door-bell.

It was some time before that summons was answered, but no one of the waiting group seemed to have anything to say to the others during the interval. The mystery of time itself was in the atmosphere. Some brooding spirit of the past might have been peering out at them from the watchman\'s wicket in the bartizan above. They stood still and silent until, at last, the postern in the big double-doorway was unlatched from within and a grey-haired, elderly woman with a hard-featured face, much lined and seamed, in the stiffly rustling garb of a superior servant, appeared in the narrow opening and dropped them an old-fashioned curtsy after a quick, shrewd glance at them.

"If it isn\'t too late, we\'d like to be allowed to look over the castle," Slyne said politely raising his cap.

The woman was gazing intently at Sallie. She started as Mr. Jobling coughed, with intention, after they had waited a ............