to his daughter's room, to the room of his
guest, and to the ancient chapel. With infinite caution, he crept round
and round on the narrow corkscrew stair; at any step it might have been
a catacomb cell.

He listened at the narrow corridor leading to Olivia's room and that
adjoining of her umquhile warder, Annapla; he paused, too, for a second,
at Montaiglon's door. None gave sign of life. He went up higher.

A storey over the stage on which Count Victor slumbered the stair ended
abruptly at an oaken door, which he opened with a key. As he entered,
a wild flurry of wings disturbed the interior, and by the light of the
candle and some venturesome rays of the moon a flock of bats or birds
were to be seen in precipitous flight through unglazed windows and a
broken roof.

Doom placed his candle in a niche of the wall and went over to an
ancient _armoire_, or chest, which seemed to be the only furniture of
what had apparently once been the chapel of the castle, to judge from
its size and the situation of an altar-like structure at the east end-.

He unlocked the heavy lid, threw it open, looked down with a sigh at its
contents, which seemed, in the light of he candle, nothing wonderful.
But a suit of Highland clothes, and some of the more martial
appurtenances of the lost Highland state, including the dirk that had
roused Montaiglon's suspicion!

He drew them out hurriedly upon the floor, but yet with an affectionate
tenderness, as if they were the relics of a sacristy, and with eagerness
substituted the gay tartan for his dull mulberry Saxon habiliments.
It was like the creation of a man from a lay figure. The jerk at the
kilt-belt buckle somehow seemed to brace the sluggish spirit; his
shoulders found their old square set above a well-curved back; his
feet--his knees--by an instinct took a graceful poise they had never
learned in the mean immersement of breeches and Linlithgow boots. As
he fastened his buckled brogues, he hummed the words of MacMhaister
Allister's songs:

"Oh! the black-cloth of the Saxon,
Dearer far's the Gaelic tartan!"

"Hugh Bethune's content with the waistcoat, is he?" he said to himself.
"He's no Gael to be so easily pleased, and him with a freeman's liberty!
And yet--and yet--I would be content myself to have the old stuff only
about my heart."

He assumed the doublet and plaid, drew down upon his brow a bonnet with
an eagle plume; turned him to the weapons. The knife--the pisto