berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage like grapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door. Its arch, ponderous, deep-moulded, hung a scowling eyebrow over the black and studded oak, and over all was an escutcheon with a blazon of hands fesswise and castles embattled, and the legend

Wiser than the Hiest. Hope in God!"

He stood on tiptoe to read the more easily the time-blurred characters, his baggage at his feet, his fingers pressed against the door. Some of the words he could not decipher nor comprehend, but the first was plain to his understanding.

"Doom!" said he airily and half aloud. Quelle félicité ! It is an omen."

"Doom!

Then he rapped lightly on the oak with the

pommel of his sword.

CHAPTER III.

BARON OF DOOM.

DEEP in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.

Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at a single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other evidences that suggested meagre soup as common fare in Doom.

"M. Bethune's bowl," he said to himself, "is not likely to be brimming over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much of the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry again for a louis!-Glengarry sans feu ni lieu, but always the most punctilious when most nearly penniless."

Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; then reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously bare the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, and sheathed the steel.

But

A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently just inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain clanked. something informed the Count Victor that he was being observed, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss was missing about the height of

his head, and that through the hole an eye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with a hole in a door will not make plain the reason of it; but in that eye, apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count Victor saw its owner fully revealed.

A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well as humour. A domestic-a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count Victor could not resist smiling back to it.

And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold, with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a military salute.

"Doom?" inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.

66

Jist that," answered the servitor a little drily, and yet with a smile puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to each other on the quays.

66 Is your master at home?" he asked.

"At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken," said the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural geniality and burlesque importance, "It's the auld styles aboot Doom, sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously before the like o' me could say.'

My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I—”

B

66

Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon," cried the little man with a salute more profound than before. "We're prood to see you, and hoo are they a' in France?"

"Tolerably well, I thank you," said Count Victor, amused at this grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.

Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing to look through the spyhole in the door, and seized the stranger's mails. With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time of a soldier, he turned to the right-about, paused a second, squared his shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.

"This way, your honour," said he. "Ye'll paurdon my discreetion, for it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld, bauld, gallant forms and ceremonies. I jalouse ye cam roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot the kennin'o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi' a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a wasp's byke."

The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut of itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odour of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was to be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shell that is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasant anticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterly erroneous, mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behind the little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner.

The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance was held half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein were surprise and curiosity.

"The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France," announced Mungo, stepping aside, still with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing by the door to give dignity to the introduction and the

entrance.

The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servant when he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller cocked hat in one hand and fondling the up-turned moustache with the other; something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly dismissed the man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he turned a questioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing him one of the few chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms.

"You are welcome, sir," he said simply in a literal rendering of his native Gaelic phrase; "take your breath. And you will have refreshment?"

Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. "It is the custom of the country," said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling among glasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunity of settling down to his new surroundings. A room ill-furnished as a monk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in massive walls built for a more bickering age than this-Count Victor took all in at a glance, and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds, who had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typical Highland stronghold.

The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head slightly to see