was walking. The night was cool,
the dew lay on the deep fern; there was a sweet smell from the grass and
from the pine wood.

In the meantime, Randal was digging a long trench with his pickaxe,
above the place where the old woman had knelt, as far as he could
remember it.

He worked very hard, and when he was in the trench up to his knees, his
pickaxe struck against a stone. He dug round it with the spade, and
came to a layer of black burnt ashes of bones. Beneath these, which he
scraped away, was the large flat stone on which his pick had struck. It
was a wide slab of red sandstone, and Randal soon saw that it was the
lid of a great stone coffin, such as the ploughshare sometimes strikes
against when men are ploughing the fields in the Border country.

Randal had seen these before, when he was a boy, and he knew that there
was never much in them, except ashes and one or two rough pots of burnt
clay.

He was much disappointed.

It had seemed as if he was really coming to something, and, behold, it
was only an old stone coffin!

However, he worked on till he had cleared the whole of the stone
coffin-lid. It was a very large stone chest, and must have been made,
Randal thought, for the body of a very big man.

With the point of his pickaxe he raised the lid.

In the moonlight he saw something of a strange shape.

He put down his hand, and pulled it out.

It was an image, in metal, about a foot high, and represented a
beautiful woman, with wings on her shoulders, sitting on a wheel.

Randal had never seen an image like this; but in an old book, which
belonged to the Monks of Melrose, he had seen, when he was a boy, a
picture of such a woman.

The Monks had told him that she was Fortune, with her swift wings that
carry her from one person to another, as luck changes, and with her
wheel that she turns with the turning of chance in the world.

The image was very heavy. Randal rubbed some of the dirt and red clay
off, and found that the metal was yellow. He cut it with his knife; it
was soft. He cleaned a piece, which shone bright and unrusted in the
moonlight, and touched it with his tongue. Then he had no doubt any
more. _The image was gold!_

[Illustration: Page 308]

Randal knew now that the old nurse had not been mistaken. With the help
of the fairy water she had seen _The Gold of Fairnilee_. He called very
softly to Jeanie, who came glimmering in her white robes through the
wood, looking herself lik