she, as she took my
cloak from me.

Ephraim had gone back to the drawing-room, and I followed. I glanced at
the French clock on the mantelpiece, where a gold Cupid in a robe of
blue enamel was mowing down an array of hearts with a scythe, and saw
that we had been away a little over an hour. Could that be all? How
strange it seemed! People were chattering, and flirting fans, and
playing cards, as if nothing at all had happened. Miss Newton was
sitting where I had left her, talking to Mr Robert Page. Grandmamma
sat in her chair, just as usual. Nobody seemed to have missed us,
except Hatty, who said with a smile,--"I had lost you, Cary, for the
last half-hour."

"Yes," said I, "something detained me out of the room."

I only exchanged one other sentence in the course of the evening with
Ephraim:

"You will let me know how things go on? I shall be very anxious."

"Of course. Yes, I will take care of that."

And then the company broke up, and I helped Hatty to bed, and prayed
from my heart for Colonel Keith and Angus, and did not fall asleep till
I had heard Saint Olave's clock strike two. When I woke, I had been
making jumballs in the drawing-room with somebody who was both my Lady
Inverness and my Aunt Kezia, and who told me that Colonel Keith had been
appointed Governor of the American plantations, and that he would have
to be dressed in corduroy.

When I arose in the morning, I could--and willingly would--have thought
the whole a dream. But there on my finger, a solid contradiction, was
my Lady Inverness's ring.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

For four days I heard nothing more. On the Friday, my Uncle Charles
told us that rumours were abroad of the escape of a prisoner, and he
hoped it might be Angus. My Aunt Dorothea wanted to hear all the
particulars. I sat and listened, looking as grave as I could.

"Why, it seems they must have bribed some fellow to carry in a basket of
foul clothes, and then to change clothes with the prisoner, and so let
him get out. There appears to have been a girl in it as well--a girl
and a man. I suppose they were both bribed, very likely. Anyhow, the
prisoner is set free, I only hope it is young Drummond, Cary."

I said I hoped so too.

"But, dear me, what will become of the man that went in?" asked my Aunt
Dorothea.

"Oh, he'll be hanged, sure enough," said my Uncle Charles. "Only some
low fellow, I suppose, that