ng vile claret round Argyll. Your friend's incognito is
scarcely complete enough even in the dark. Why, the man's Born! I
could tell it in his first sentence, and it's a swordsman's hand, not
a cellarer's fingers, he gave me a moment ago. That itself would betray
him even if I did not happen to know that the Montaiglons have the
_particule_."

"It is quite as you say," confessed the Chamberlain with some chagrin
at his position, "but I'm giving the man's tale as he desires to have
it known here. He's no less than the Count de Montaiglon, and a rather
decent specimen of the kind, so far as I can judge."

"But why the _alias_, good Sim?" asked the Duke. "I like not your
_aliases_, though they have been, now and then--ahem!--useful."

"Your Grace has travelled before now as Baron Hay," said the
Chamberlain.

"True! true! and saved very little either in inn charges or in the
pother of State by the device. And if I remember correctly, I made no
pretence at wine-selling on these occasions. Honestly now, what the
devil does the Comte de Montaiglon do here--and with Sim MacTaggart?"

"The matter is capable of the easiest explanation. He's here on what he
is pleased to call an affair of honour, in which there is implicated the
usual girl and another gentleman, who, it appears, is some ope, still
unknown, about your Grace's castle." And the story in its entirety was
speedily his Grace's.

"H'm," ejaculated Argyll at last when he had heard all. "And you fancy
the quest as hopeless as it is quixotic? Now mark me! Simon; I read our
French friend, even in the dark, quite differently. He had little to say
there, but little as it was 'twas enough to show by its manner that he's
just the one who will find his man even in my crowded corridors."

CHAPTER XXIV -- A BROKEN TRYST

The Chamberlain's quarters were in the eastern turret, and there he went
so soon as he could leave his Grace, who quickly forgot the Frenchman
and his story, practising upon Simon the speech he had prepared in his
evening walk, alternated with praise extravagant--youthfully rapturous
almost--of his duchess, who might, from all his chafing at her absence,
have been that night at the other end of the world, instead of merely in
the next county on a few days' visit.

"Ah! you are smiling, Sim!" said he. "Old whinstone! You fancy Argyll
an imbecile of uxoriousness. Well, well, my friend, you are at liberty;
Lord knows, it's not a common disease among du