ces of children.

"These are surely but cottars' bairns," he said, smiling a little at
his own intensity of feeling, "but they sing like little angels. I
daresay my sweetheart Magdalen is amongst them."

And he sat still listening, patting Black Darnaway meanwhile on the
neck.

_"What did the robbers do to you, do to you, do to you,
What did the robbers do to you,
My fair lady?"_

The first two lines rang out bold and clear. Then again the
wistfulness of the refrain played upon his heart as if it had been an
instrument of strings, till the tears came into his eyes at the
wondrous sorrow and yearning with which one voice, the sweetest and
purest of all, replied, singing quite alone:

_"They broke my lock and stole my gold, stole my gold, stole my gold,
Broke my lock and stole my gold,
My fair lady!"_

The tears brimmed over in the eyes of William Douglas, and a deep
foreboding of the mysteries of fate fell upon his heart and abode
there heavy as doom.

He turned his head as though he felt a presence near him, and lo!
sudden and silent as the appearing of a phantom, another horse was
alongside of Black Darnaway, and upon a white palfrey a maiden dressed
also in white sat, smiling upon the young man, fair to look upon as an
angel from heaven.

Earl William's lips parted, but he was too surprised to speak.
Nevertheless, he moved his hand to his head in instinctive salutation;
but, finding his bonnet already off, he could only stare at the vision
which had so suddenly sprung out of the ground.

The lady slowly waved her hand in the direction of the children, whose
young voices still rang clear as cloister bells tolling out the
Angelus, and whose white dresses waved in the light wind as they
danced back and forth with a slow and graceful motion.

"You hear, Earl William," she said, in a low, thrilling voice,
speaking with a foreign accent, "you hear? You are a good Christian,
doubtless, and you have heard from your uncle, the Abbot, how praise
is made perfect 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.' Hark to
them; they sing of their own destinies--and it may be also of yours
and mine."

And so fascinated and moved at heart at once by her beauty and by her
strange words, the Douglas listened.

_"What did the robbers do to you, do to you, do to you,
What did the ro