the
circling beetles begin their booming curfew.

"There they come!" cried de Retz, suddenly, pointing to a few specks
of light which danced and dimpled between them and the low horizon of
the south, against which, like a spacious armada, leaned a drift of
primrose sunset clouds.

"There they come--I see them also!" said the Lady Sybilla, and
suddenly sighed heavily and without cause.

"Where, and how many?" cried the Chancellor, in a shrill pipe usually
associated with the physically deformed, but which from him meant no
more than anxious discomposure.

The marshal pointed with the steady hand of the practised commander to
the spot at which his keen eye had detected the cavalcade.

"Yonder," he said, "where the pine tree stands up against the sky."

"And how many? I cannot see them, my eyesight fails. I bid you tell me
how many," gasped the Chancellor.

The ambassador looked long.

"There are, as I think, no more than twenty or thirty riders."

Instantly the Chancellor turned and held out his hand.

"We have him," he muttered, withdrawing it again as soon as he saw
that the ambassador did not take it, being occupied gazing under his
palm at the approaching train of riders.

The Lady Sybilla sat silent and watched the company which rode towards
them--with what thoughts in her heart, who shall venture to guess? She
kept her head studiously averted from the Marshal de Retz, and once
when he touched her arm to call attention to something, she shuddered
and moved a little nearer to the Chancellor. Nevertheless, she obeyed
her companion implicitly and without question when he bade her ride
forward with them to receive the Chancellor's guests.

Crichton took it on himself to rally the girl on her silence.

"Of what may you be thinking so seriously?" he said.

"Of thirty pieces of silver," she replied instantly.

And at these words the marshal turned upon the girl a regard so black
and relentless that the Chancellor, happening to encounter it, shrank
back abashed, even as some devilkin caught in a fault might shrink
from the angry eyes of the Master of Evil.

But the Lady Sybilla looked calmly at her kinsman.

"Of what do you complain?" he asked her.

"I complain of nothing," she made him answer. "I am that which I am,
and I am that which you have made me, my Lord of Retz. Fear not, I
will do my part."

Right handsome looked the young Earl of Douglas, as with a flush of
expectation and pleasure on his