ip pleasure to see him, if he would favour him
with a call.

In a few minutes he was again on the road to the castle.

CHAPTER XI.

THE EARL.

He met no one on his way from the gate up through the wood. He
ascended the hill with its dark ascending firs, to its crown of silvery
birches, above which, as often as the slowly circling road brought him
to the other side, he saw rise like a helmet the gray mass of the
fortress. Turret and tower, pinnacle and battlement, appeared and
disappeared as he climbed. Not until at last he stood almost on the
top, and from an open space beheld nearly the whole front, could he
tell what it was like. It was a grand pile, but looked a gloomy one to
live in.

He stood on a broad grassy platform, from which rose a gravelled
terrace, and from the terrace the castle. He ran his eye along the
front seeking a door but saw none. Ascending the terrace by a broad
flight of steps, he approached a deep recess in the front, where two
portions of the house of differing date nearly met. Inside this recess
he found a rather small door, flush with the wall, thickly studded and
plated with iron, surmounted by the Morven horses carved in gray stone,
and surrounded with several mouldings. Looking for some means of
announcing his presence, he saw a handle at the end of a rod of iron,
and pulled, but heard nothing: the sound of the bell was smothered in a
wilderness of stone walls. By and by, however, appeared an old
servant, bowed and slow, with plentiful hair white as wool, and a
mingled look of childishness and caution in his wrinkled countenance.

"The earl wants to see me," said Donal.

"What name?" said the man.

"Donal Grant; but his lordship will be nothing the wiser, I suspect; I
don't think he knows my name. Tell him--the young man he sent for to
Andrew Comin's."

The man left him, and Donal began to look about him. The place where
he stood was a mere entry, a cell in huge walls, with a second, a low,
round-headed door, like the entrance to a prison, by which the butler
had disappeared. There was nothing but bare stone around him, with
again the Morven arms cut deep into it on one side. The ceiling was
neither vaulted nor groined nor flat, but seemed determined by the
accidental concurrence of ends of stone stairs and corners of floors on
different levels. It was full ten minutes before the man returned and
requested him to follow him.

Immediately Donal found himself