s when he wooed
her in the pleasaunce, with her golden hair glittering as before in
the sunshine, and the love-light again in her eye. And beside her, oh!
fickleness of a woman's heart, oh! irony of life, oh! cruelty to the
most faithful passion, Colonel Livingstone, now my Lord Kilsyth. And
an expression of fierce satisfaction lit up the Covenanter's ghastly
face.

"This then was thy revenge, Jean, for the insult I offered at
Glenogilvie, and I was right in my fear that thy love was shattered.
Be it so," said Claverhouse, "I believe that thou wast loyal while I
lived, and now, while I may have hoped other things of thee, I will
not grudge thee in thy loneliness peace and protection. When this
heart of mine, which ever beat for thee, lies cold in the grave, and
my hair, that thou didst caress, has mingled with the dust, may joy be
with thee, Jean, and God's sunshine ever rest upon thy golden crown.
Thou didst think, servant of the devil, to damn my soul in the black
depths of jealousy and hatred, as once I damned myself, but I have
escaped, and I defy thee. Do as thou pleasest, thou canst not break my
spirit or make me bend. Hast thou other visions?"

"One more," said the spirit, "and I have done with thee, proud and
unrepentant sinner."

Before Claverhouse is a room in which there has been some sudden
disaster, for the roof has fallen and buried in its ruins a bed
whereon someone had been sleeping, and a cradle in which some child
had been lying. In the foreground is a coffin covered by a pall.

"She was called before her judge without warning, prepared or
unprepared, and thou hadst better see her for the last time ere she
goes to the place of the dead." And then the cloth being lifted,
Claverhouse looked on the face of his wife, with her infant child, not
his, but Kilsyth's, lying at her feet. There was no abatement in the
splendor of her hair, nor the pride of her countenance; the flush was
still upon her cheek, and though her eyes were closed there was
courage in the set of her lips. By an unexpected blow she had been
stricken and perished, but in the fullness of her magnificent
womanhood, and undismayed. Lying there she seemed to defy death, and
her mother's curse, which had come true at last.

"So thou also art to be cut off in the midst of thy days, Jean. Better
this way both for you and me, than to grow old and become feeble, and
be carried to and fro, and be despised. We were born to rule and not
to serv