CHAPTER XXXII
EVENTS OF FRIDAY MORNING: THE CUTTING OF THE GORDIAN KNOT
I pulled out my watch. A fickle ray—the merest filtration of moonlight—glimmered on the dial. Fourteen minutes past one! "Past yin o'clock, and a dark, haary moarnin." I recalled the bull voice of the watchman as he had called it on the night of our escape from the Castle—its very tones: and this echo of memory seemed to strike and reverberate the hour closing a long day of fate. Truly since that night the hands had run full circle, and were back at the old starting-point. I had seen dawn, day: I had basked in the sunshine of men's respect; I was back in the Stygian night—back in the shadow of that infernal Castle—still hunted by the law—with possibly a smaller chance than ever of escape—the cockshy of the elements—with no shelter for my head but a Paisley shawl of violent pattern. It occurred to me that I had travelled much in the interval, and run many risks, to exchange a suit of mustard yellow for a Paisley shawl and a ball dress that matched neither it nor the climate of the Pentlands. The exhilaration of the ball, the fighting spirit, the last communicated thrill of Flora's hand, died out of me. In the thickening envelope of sea fog I felt like a squirrel in a rotatory cage. That was a lugubrious hour.
To speak precisely, those were seven lugubrious hours, since Flora would not be due before eight o'clock, if, indeed, I might count on her eluding her double cordon of
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