to-night: you'll have to stay at Cockhoolet, and
be glad if you can get home to-morrow."

"And where have you come from, and where are you going to?" she asked.

"I came from London--I have only been a week home from Australia--and
I am on my way to Eildon. But here we are."

And the hospitable doors of Cockhoolet were thrown wide, sending out a
glow of light to welcome the belated travelers.

Mrs. Ormiston and her daughter, Mrs. Forester--who with her husband
was on a visit at Cockhoolet--received them and took them to
rooms where fires made what seemed tropical heat compared with the
atmosphere in the glass case on the moor.

Miss Garscube was able for nothing but to go to bed, and Miss Adamson
stayed with her in the room called Queen Mary's, being the room that
unfortunate lady occupied when she visited Cockhoolet.

On this night the castle must have thought old times had come back
again, there was such a large and miscellaneous company beneath its
roof. But where were the knights in armor, the courtiers in velvet and
satin, the boars' heads, the venison pasties, the wassail-bowls? Where
were the stately dames in stiff brocade, the shaven priests, the
fool in motley, the vassals, the yeomen in hodden gray and broad blue
bonnet? Not there, certainly.

No doubt, Lady Arthur Eildon was a direct descendant of one of "the
queen's Maries," but in her rusty black gown, her old black bonnet set
awry on her head, her red face, her stout figure, made stouter by a
sealskin jacket, you could not at a glance see the connection. The
house of Eildon was pretty closely connected with the house of Stuart,
but George Eildon in his tweed suit, waterproof and wideawake looked
neither royal nor romantic. We may be almost sure that there was a
fool or fools in the company, but they did not wear motley. In short,
as yet it is difficult to connect the idea of romance with railway
rugs, waterproofs, India-rubbers and wide-awakes and the steam of tea
and coffee: three hundred years hence perhaps it may be possible.
Who knows? But for all that, romances go on, we may be sure, whether
people are clad in velvet or hodden gray.

Lady Arthur was framing a romance--a romance which had as much of the
purely worldly in it as a romance can hold. She found that George was
on his way to see his cousin, Lord Eildon, who within two days had
had a severe access of illness. It seemed to her a matter of certainty
that George would be duke of Eildon