his neck. A boat immediately put off from the island and
came towards the arrivals, set in motion by four vigorous oarsmen, who
had soon propelled it across the space which separated it from the bank.
Mary silently got into it, and sat down at the stern, while Lord Lindsay
and his equerry stood up before her; and as her guide did not seem any
more inclined to speak than she was herself to respond, she had plenty of
time to examine her future dwelling.

The castle, or rather the fortress of Lochleven, already somewhat gloomy
in its situation and architecture, borrowed fresh mournfulness still from
the hour at which it appeared to the queen's gaze. It was, so far as she
could judge amid the mists rising from the lake, one of those massive
structures of the twelfth century which seem, so fast shut up are they,
the stone armour of a giant. As she drew near, Mary began to make out
the contours of two great round towers, which flanked the corners and
gave it the severe character of a state prison. A clump of ancient trees
enclosed by a high wall, or rather by a rampart, rose at its north front,
and seemed vegetation in stone, and completed the general effect of this
gloomy abode, while, on the contrary, the eye wandering from it and
passing from islands to islands, lost itself in the west, in the north,
and in the south, in the vast plain of Kinross, or stopped southwards at
the jagged summits of Ben Lomond, whose farthest slopes died down on the
shores of the lake.

Three persons awaited Mary at the castle door: Lady Douglas, William
Douglas her son, and a child of twelve who was called Little Douglas, and
who was neither a son nor a brother of the inhabitants of the castle, but
merely a distant relative. As one can imagine, there were few
compliments between Mary and her hosts; and the queen, conducted to her
apartment, which was on the first floor, and of which the windows
overlooked the lake, was soon left with Mary Seyton, the only one of the
four Marys who had been allowed to accompany her.

However, rapid as the interview had been, and short and measured the
words exchanged between the prisoner and her gaolers, Mary had had time,
together with what she knew of them beforehand, to construct for herself
a fairly accurate idea of the new personages who had just mingled in her
history.

Lady Lochleven, wife of Lord William Douglas, of whom we have already
said a few words at the beginning of this history, was a wom