t leaning against the jamb--a figure of dejection!

"Dod!" cried Mungo, "ye fair started me there, wi' your chafts like clay
and yer ee'n luntin'. If I hadnae been tauld when I was doon wi' yer
coat the day that ye was oot and aboot again, I wad hae taen 't for your
wraith."

The Chamberlain said nothing. There was something inexpressibly solemn
in his aspect as he leaned wearily against the side of the door, his
face like clay, as Mungo had truly said, and his eyes flaming in the
light of the lantern. The flageolet was in his hand; he was shivering
with cold. And he was silent. The silence of him was the most staggering
fact for the little domestic, who would have been relieved to hear an
oath or even have given his coat-collar to a vigorous shaking rather
than be compelled to look on misery inarticulate. Simon looked past him
into the shadows of the hall as a beggar looks into a garden where is
no admission for him or his kind. A fancy seized Mungo that perhaps this
dumb man had been drinking. "He's gey like a man on the randan," he said
to himself, peering cautiously, "but he never had a name for the glass
though namely for the lass."

"Is she in?" said the Chamberlain, suddenly, without changing his
attitude, and with scanty interest in his eyes.

"Oh ay! She's in, sure enough," said Mungo. "Whaur else wad she be but
in?"

"And she'll have heard me?" continued the Chamberlain.

"I'll warrant ye!" said Mungo.

"What's wrong?"

Mungo pursed out his lips and shook his lantern. "Ye can be askin'
that," said he. "Gude kens!"

The Chamberlain still leaned wearily against the door jamb, mentally
whelmed by dejection, bodily weak as water. His ride on a horse along
the coast had manifestly not been the most fitting exercise for a man
new out of bed and the hands of his physician.

"What about the foreigner?" said he at length, and glowered the more
into the interior as if he might espy him.

Mungo was cautious. This was the sort of person who on an impulse would
rush the guard and create a commotion in the garrison; he temporised.

"The foreigner?" said he, as if there were so many in his experience
that some discrimination was called for. "Oh ay, the Coont. A gey queer
birkie yon! He's no' awa yet. He's sittin' on his dowp yet, waitin' a
dispensation o' Providence that'll gie him a heeze somewhere else."

"Is--he--is he with her?" said Simon.

"Oh, thereaboots, thereaboots," admitted Mungo, cautiously. "Th