ce of the lattice, which opened into the
summer's night.

"'Ware window!" came again the cautious voice from far below. Sholto
heard the whistle and "spat" of an arrow against the wall without. It
must have fallen again, for the voice 'came a third time--"'Ware
window!"

And on this occasion the archer was successful, guided doubtless by
the illumination of the lantern the guard had hung on a nail, and
whose flicker would outline the lattice faintly against the darkness
of the wall.

An arrow entered with a soft hiss. It struck beyond them with a click,
and its iron point tinkled on the floor, the plaster of the opposite
wall not holding it.

Sholto scrambled about the floor on hands and knees till he found it.
It was a common archer's arrow. A cord was fastened about it, and a
note stuck in the slit along with the feather.

"It is my brother Laurence," whispered Sholto. "I warrant he is
beneath with a rope and a posse of stout fellows. We shall escape them
yet."

But even as he raised the letter to read it by the faint blue flicker
of the lantern, there came a cry of pain from within the castle. It
was a woman's voice that cried, and at the sound of pleading speech in
some chamber above them, William Douglas started to his feet.

The words were clear enough, but in a language not understood by
Sholto MacKim. They seemed intelligible enough, however, to the Earl.

"I knew it," he cried; "the false hounds have imprisoned her also. It
is Sybilla's voice. God in heaven--they are torturing her!"

He ran to the door and shook it vehemently.

"Ho! Without there!" he cried imperiously, as if in his own Castle at
Thrieve.

But no one paid any attention to his shouts, and presently the woman's
voice died down to a slow sobbing which was quite audible in the room
beneath, where the three young men listened.

"What did she say?" asked David, presently, of his brother, who still
stood with his ear to the door.

The Earl first made a gesture commanding silence, and then, hearing
nothing more, he came slowly over to the window. "It is the Lady
Sybilla," he said, in a voice which revealed his deep emotion. "She
said, in the French language, 'You shall not kill him. You shall not!
He trusted me and he shall not die.'"

Meanwhile Sholto, knowing that there was no time to lose, had been
drawing in the cord, which presently thickened into a rope stout
enough to support the weight of a light and active youth such as any