he bracken where the Count had dropped his bird revealed no
feather; the rain of the morning had obliterated every other trace. He
stood upon the very spot whence he had fired at the luckless robber, and
restored, with the same thrill of apprehension, the sense of mystery
and of dread that had hung round him as he stole the day before through
voiceless woods to the sound of noisy breakers on a foreign shore.
He saw again the brake nod in a little air of wind as if a form was
harboured, and the pagan rose in him--not the sceptic but the child
of nature, early and remote, lost in lands of silence and of omen in
dim-peopled and fantastic woods upon the verge of clamorous seas.

"_Dieu!_" said he with a shiver, turning to his host. "This is decidedly
not Verrays in the Rue Conde. I would give a couple of louis d'or for a
moment of the bustle of Paris.

"A sad place yon!" said Doom.

And back they went to the castle to play a solemn game of lansquenet.

CHAPTER VII -- THE BAY OF THE BOAR'S HEAD

A solemn game indeed, for the Baron was a man of a sobriety
unaccountable to Montaiglon, who, from what he knew of Macdonnel of
Barisdel, Mac-leod, Balhaldie, and the others of the Gaelic gang in
Paris, had looked for a roysterer in Doom. It was a man with strange
melancholies he found there, with a ludicrous decorum for a person of
his condition, rising regularly on the hour, it seemed, and retiring
early to his chamber like a peasant, keeping no company with the
neighbouring lairds because he could not even pretend to emulate their
state, passing his days among a score of books in English, some (as the
Sieur de Guille) in French, and a Bedel Bible in the Irish letter,
and as often walking aimlessly about the shore looking ardently at the
hills, and rehearsing to himself native rhymes that ever account
native women the dearest and the same hills the most beautiful in God's
creation. He was the last man to look to for aid in an enterprise like
Montaiglon's: if he had an interest in the exploit it seemed it was only
to discourage the same, and an hour or two of his company taught the
Count he must hunt his spy unaided.

But the hunting of the spy, in the odd irrelevance or inconsistency of
nature, was that day at least an enterprise altogether absent from
his thoughts. He had been diverted from the object of his journey to
Scotland by just such a hint at romance as never failed to fascinate a
Montaiglon, and he must be puz