r when the Duke came into the room softly on his
tiptoes, humming her refrain. A keen ear might have perceived the
slightest of alterations in the tone of her next stanza; a quick eye
might have noticed a shade of disappointment come to her face when
her intent but momentary glance at the door revealed that some one she
sought was not entering. The only ear that heard, the only eye that
saw, was Kilkerran's. He was a moralist by repute, and he would have
suspected without reasons. When Mrs. Petullo broke down miserably--in
her third verse, he smiled to himself pawkily, went up to her with a
compliment, and confirmed his suspicions by her first question, which
was as to the Chamberlain's absence.

As for the Chamberlain, he was by now hurrying with great speed through
the castle garden. Only once he slacked his pace, and that was when the
garden path joined the more open policies of the Duke, and another step
or two would place a thicket of laburnums and hawthorns between him and
the sight of the litten windows. He hung on his heel and looked back for
a minute or two at the castle, looming blackly in the darkness against
the background of Dunchuach; he could hear the broken stanza of Mrs.
Petullo's ballad.

"Amn't I the damned fool?" said he half-aloud to himself with bitter
certainty in the utterance. "There's my punishment: by something
sham--and I ken it's sham too--I must go through life beguiled from
right and content. Here's what was to be the close of my folly, and Sim
MacTaggart eager to be a good man if he got anything like a chance, but
never the chance for poor Sim MacTaggart!"

He plunged into the darkness of the road that led to the Maltland
barracks where the fifty claymores were quartered.

CHAPTER XI -- THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW

Count Victor heard the woman's lamentation die away in the pit of the
stair before he ceased to wonder at the sound and had fully realised the
unpleasantness of his own incarceration. It was the cries of the outer
assault that roused him from mere amazement to a comprehension of the
dangers involved in his being thus penned in a cell and his enemies kept
at bay by some wooden bars and a wooden-head. He felt with questioning
fingers along the walls, finding no crevice to suggest outer air till
he reached the window, and, alas! an escape from a window at that height
seemed out of the question without some machinery at hand.

"I suspected the little clown's laughter," said