d for the
following night; if it reappears no more, it is fixed for the same
evening; then the owl's cry, repeated thrice in the courtyard, will be
the signal; let down the ladder when you hear it".

"Oh, Douglas," cried the queen, "you alone could foresee and calculate
everything thus. Thank you, thank you a hundred times!" And she gave him
her hand to kiss.

A vivid red flushed the young man's cheeks; but almost directly
mastering his emotion, he kneeled down, and, restraining the expression
of that love of which he had once spoken to the queen, while promising
her never more to speak of it, he took the hand that Mary extended, and
kissed it with such respect that no one could have seen in this action
anything but the homage of devotion and fidelity.

Then, having bowed to the queen, he went out, that a longer stay with
her should not give rise to any suspicions.

At the dinner-hour Douglas brought, as he had said, a parcel of cord. It
was not enough, but when evening came Mary Seyton was to unroll it and
let fall the end from the window, and George would fasten the remainder
to it: the thing was done as arranged, and without any mishap, an hour
after the hunters had returned.

The following day George left the castle.

The queen and Mary Seyton lost no time in setting about the rope ladder,
and it was finished on the third day. The same evening, the queen in
her impatience, and rather to assure herself of her partisans' vigilance
than in the hope that the time of her deliverance was so near, brought
her lamp to the window: immediately, and as George Douglas had told her,
the light in the little house at Kinross disappeared: the queen then
laid her hand on her heart and counted up to twenty-two; then the light
reappeared; they were ready for everything, but nothing was yet settled.
For a week the queen thus questioned the light and her heart-beats
without their number changing; at last, on the eighth day, she counted
only as far as ten; at the eleventh the light reappeared.

The queen believed herself mistaken: she did not dare to hope what this
announced. She withdrew the lamp; then, at the end of a quarter of an
hour, showed it again: her unknown correspondent understood with his
usual intelligence that a fresh trial was required of him, and the light
in the little house disappeared in its turn. Mary again questioned the
pulsations of her heart, and, fast as it leaped, before the twelfth beat
the propitious