tary salute.

"Doom?" inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.

"Jist that," answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile
puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled
brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked
of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port
of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again
for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to
each other on the quays.

"Is your master at home?" he asked.

"At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken," said
the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural
geniality and burlesque importance, "It's the auld styles aboot Doom,
sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the
Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously
before the like o' me could say."

"My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I--"

"Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon," cried the little man with a
salute more profound than before. "We're prood to see you, and hoo are
they a' in France?"

"Tolerably well, I thank you," said Count Victor, amused at this
grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.

Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing
to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag.
With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time
of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared his
shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.

"This way, your honour," said he. "Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for
it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and
ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's
droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot
the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi'
a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a
wasp's byke."

The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut
of itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it
borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odour
of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was to
be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shell
tha