ox filled with relics of her short reign in Holyrood: her neat
embroideries, her tear bottle, and Darnley's glove, which Barrie thought
Mary would not like to have kept with the other things: and then, having
saved the best for the last, I took the girl up to the little
supper-room where Rizzio was murdered. Barrie gazed at everything in
silence: and now we could both be silent when we liked, for the
chastened ones had meekly trooped off to show Mrs. James the Abbey, or
Royal Chapel, where Mary and Darnley were married, and where a hundred
things had happened, things connected with others whose romances were as
poignant if less well remembered here, than hers.

We had come up the secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie
to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of
the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my
dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet
where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was
drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, to the bevelled mirror with
scalloped edge, which Mary brought with her to Scotland from France, a
dim oval full of memories, may be, of dear, dead days at Amboise and
Chenonceaux.

"What does that poor piece of blurred glass make you think of so
intently?" I asked, when Barrie had stood silently staring down the
veiled vista of mystery for many minutes. "You look like a young modern
Cassandra, crystal gazing."

"So I am!" the girl almost whispered. "I'm trying to see something in
the mirror--the things _she_ saw in it--or to see her eyes looking into
mine. If anything can be haunted, it is this mirror. Think of what has
passed before it. But do you know, I don't believe it has ever really
intelligently seen anything since the day Queen Mary went away from
Holyrood. I feel she ran here, to take one last look into her mirror,
and to bid it farewell as she bade farewell to France, gazing and gazing
as the land faded from her sight forever. Then, when she'd gone, the
glass she loved grew dim as it is now, and _blind_ because it could no
longer give back the brightness of her eyes. There's nothing left in it
now but sad dreams and memories of the past."

"Did you ever," I asked, "go down into the cellar at midnight on All
Hallow E'en with a candle and a mirror and wish to see the face of your
future husband?"

"No, indeed," Barrie answered emphatically; "we had no such tricks a