o my workroom. I looked up
from my colours, whereat his face, which was ruddy, grew wan, he
staggered back, and, being lame, reeled against the wall. There he
brought up, crossing himself, and making the sign of the cross at me.

"Avaunt!" he said, "in the name of this holy sign, whether thou art a
wandering spirit, or a devil in a dead man's semblance."

"Master," I said, "I am neither spirit nor devil. Was it ever yet heard
that brownie or bogle mixed colours for a painter? Nay, touch me, and
see whether I am not of sinful Scots flesh and blood"; and thereon I
laughed aloud, knowing what caused his fear, and merry at the sight of
it, for he had ever held tales of "diablerie," and of wraiths and freits
and fetches, in high scorn.

He sat him down on a chair and gaped upon me, while I could not contain
myself from laughing.

"For God's sake," said he, "bring me a cup of red wine, for my wits are
wandering. Deil's buckie," he said in the Scots, "will water not drown
you? Faith, then, it is to hemp that you were born, as shall shortly be
seen."

I drew him some wine from a cask that stood in the corner, on draught. He
drank it at one venture, and held out the cup for more, the colour coming
back into his face.

"Did the archers tell me false, then, when they said that you had fired
up at a chance word, and flung yourself and the sentinel into the moat?
And where have you been wasting your time, and why went you from the
bridge ere I came back, if the archers took another prentice lad for
Norman Leslie?"

"They told you truth," I said.

"Then, in the name of Antichrist--that I should say so!--how scaped you
drowning, and how came you here?"

I told him the story, as briefly as might be.

"Ill luck go with yon second-sighted wench that has bewitched Elliot, and
you too, for all that I can see. Never did I think to be frayed with a
bogle, {14} and, as might have been deemed, the bogle but a prentice
loon, when all was done. To my thinking all this fairy work is no more
true than that you are a dead man's wraith. But they are all wild about
it, at the castle, where I was kept long, doing no trade, and listening
to their mad clatter."

He took out of his pouch a parcel heedfully wrapped in soft folds of
silk.

"Here is this Book of Hours," he said, "that I have spent my eyesight,
and gold, purple, and carmine, and cobalt upon, these three years past; a
jewel it is, though I say so. And I had good hop