ion now. He had no right to reveal his later discovery. He
lingered a few moments in the hall. The buzzing of the piper's drones
gave him that impression of confused and blindly aggressive intoxication
which he had often before noticed in this barbaric instrument, and had
always seemed to him as the origin of its martial inspiration. From this
he was startled by voices and steps in the gallery he had just
quitted, but which came from the opposite direction to his room. It was
Kilcraithie and Mrs. MacSpadden. As she caught sight of him, he fancied
she turned slightly and aggressively pale, with a certain hardening of
her mischievous eyes. Nevertheless, she descended the staircase
more deliberately than her companion, who brushed past him with an
embarrassed self-consciousness, quite in advance of her. She lingered
for an instant.

"You are not dancing?" she said.

"No."

"Perhaps you are more agreeably employed?"

"At this exact moment, certainly."

She cast a disdainful glance at him, crossed the hall, and followed
Kilcraithie.

"Hang me, if I understand it all!" mused the consul, by no means
good-humoredly. "Does she think I have been spying upon her and her
noble chieftain? But it's just as well that I didn't tell her anything."

He turned to follow them. In the vestibule he came upon a figure which
had halted before a large pier-glass. He recognized M. Delfosse, the
French visitor, complacently twisting the peak of his Henri Quatre
beard. He would have passed without speaking, but the Frenchman glanced
smilingly at the consul and his buttonhole. Again the flower!

"Monsieur is decore," he said gallantly.

The consul assented, but added, not so gallantly, that though they were
not in France he might still be unworthy of it. The baleful flower had
not improved his temper. Nor did the fact that, as he entered the room,
he thought the people stared at him--until he saw that their attention
was directed to Lady Deeside, who had entered almost behind him. From
his hostess, who had offered him a seat beside her, he gathered that
M. Delfosse and Kilcraithie had each temporarily occupied his room, but
that they had been transferred to the other wing, apart from the married
couples and young ladies, because when they came upstairs from
the billiard and card room late, they sometimes disturbed the fair
occupants. No!--there were no ghosts at Glenbogie. Mysterious footsteps
had sometimes been heard in the ladies' corr