Mungo Boyd locked him up in Doom and the fictitious
broken clan cried "Loch Sloy!" in darkness. For this was not wholly the
wilds, and Argyll's manner, though stern, was that of one who desired in
all circumstances to be just.

So Count Victor sat on a box and shivered in his shirt-sleeves and
fervently wished for breakfast. The snow fell heavily now, and drifted
in the fosse and whitened the world; outside, therefore, all was silent;
there must be bustle and footsteps, but here they were unheard: it
seemed in a while that he was buried in catacombs, an illusion so
vexatious that he felt he must dispel it at all hazards.

There was but one way to do so. He stood on his box and tried to reach
the window over his door. To break the glass was easy, but when that was
done and the snow was cleared away by his hand, he could see out only
by pulling himself up with an awkward and exhausting grasp on the narrow
ledge. Thus he secured but the briefest of visions of what was outside,
and that was not a reassuring one.

Had he meditated escape from the window, he must now abandon it; for
on the other side of the ditch, cowering in the shelter of one of the
castle doors, was standing one of the two men who had placed him in the
cell, there apparently for no other purpose than to keep an eye on the
only possible means of exit from the discarded wine-cellar.

The breaking glass was unheard by the watcher; at all events he made no
movement to suggest that he had observed it, and he said nothing about
it when some time later in the forenoon he came with Count Victor's
breakfast, which was generous enough to confirm his belief that in
Argyll's hands he was at least assured of the forms of justice, though
that, in truth, was not the most consoling of prospects.

His warder was a dumb dog, a squint-eyed Cerberus with what Count Victor
for once condemned as a tribal gibberish for his language, so that he
was incapable of understanding what was said to him even if he had been
willing to converse.

"It is little good to play the guitar to an ass," said the Frenchman,
and fell to his viands.

CHAPTER XXX -- A DUCAL DISPUTATION

If Count Victor, buried among cobwebs in the fosse, stung by cold till
he shivered as in a quartan ague, suffering alternately the chagrin of
the bungler self-discovered and the apprehension of a looming fate
whose nature could only be guessed at, was in a state unenviable,
Argyll himself was scarcely l