ut you. He was to meet me after the
court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the
castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin',
as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle,
though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been
little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been
waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat
of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will
have to be put off a day or two longer."

CHAPTER XIII -- A LAWYER'S GOOD LADY

The remainder of the night passed without further alarm, but Count
Victor lay only on the frontiers of forgetfulness till morning, his
senses all on sentry, and the salt, wind-blown dawn found him abroad
before the rest of Doom was well awake. He met the calesh of the Lords
going back the way it had come with an outrider in a red jacket from
the stable of Argyll: it passed him on the highway so close that he saw
Elchies and Kilkerran half sleeping within as they drove away from the
scene of their dreadful duties. In a cloak of rough watchet blue he had
borrowed from his host and a hat less conspicuous than that he had come
in from Stirling, he passed, to such strangers in the locality, for some
tacksman of the countryside, or a traveller like themselves. To have
ventured into the town, however, where every one would see he was a
stranger and speedily inquire into his business there, was, as he had
been carefully apprised by Doom the night before, a risk too great to
be run without good reason. Stewart's trial had created in the country
a state of mind that made a stranger's presence there somewhat hazardous
for himself, and all the more so in the case of a foreigner, for,
rightly or wrongly, there was associated with the name of the condemned
man as art and part in the murder that of a Highland officer in the
service of the French. There had been rumours, too, of an attempted
rescue on the part of the Stewarts of Ardshiel, Achnacoin, and
Fasnacloich--all that lusty breed of the ancient train: the very numbers
of them said to be on the drove-roads with weapons from the thatch were
given in the town, and so fervently believed in that the appearance of
a stranger without any plausible account to give of himself would have
stirred up tumult.

Count Victor eluded the more obvious danger of the town, but in his
forenoon ra