Dundee was a man of many trials, and one on whom fortune seldom smiled; but the most cruel days of his life were the ride from Inverness by the Pass of Corryarrack to Blair Athole, and from Blair Athole by Perth to Dundee. He learned then, as many men have done in times of their distress, the horror of the night time and the blessing of the light. Had his mind not been affected by the universal treachery of the time, and the disappointments he had met on every side, till it seemed that every man except himself was hunting after his own interest, and no one, high or low, could be trusted, he had from the beginning treated Grimond's story with contempt and made it a subject of jest. He would no more have doubted Jean's honor than that of his mother.
He would have known that Grimond never lied, and that he did not often drink, but he also would have been sure that even if it was Jean who met Livingstone, that there was some good explanation, and he never would have allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the matter. If Jean had been told that Graham had been seen with a lady of the Court at Whitehall, she would have scorned to question him, and indeed she had often laughed at the snares certain frail beauties of that day had laid for him in London. For she knew him, and he also knew her. But he was sorely tried in spirit and driven half crazy by the disloyalty of his friends, and it is in those circumstances of morbid, unhealthy feeling that the seeds of suspicion find a root and grow, as the microbes settle upon susceptible and disordered organs of the body.
As it was, he was divided in his mind, and it was the alternation of dark and bright moods which made his agony. Spring had only reached the Highlands as he rode southwards, but its first touches had made everything winsome and beautiful. While patches of snow lingered on the higher hills, and glittered in the sunlight, the grass in the hollows between the heather was putting on the first greenness of the season, and the heather was sprouting bravely; the burns were full-bodied with the melting snow from the higher levels and rushing with a pleasant noise to join the river. As he came down from the bare uplands at Dalnaspidal into the sheltered glen at Blair Castle, the trees made an arch of the most delicate emerald over his head, for the buds were beginning to open, and the wind blew gently upon his face.