These maskers did not walk side by side, but one behind the other, and, possibly, to ordinary onlookers would not have appeared to have any connection with each other. Yet Kitty knew very well that, inseparable in almost all else, they were now equally so. The first, who was the tallest, was clad in a costume, perhaps unique that night in the Spring Gardens, perhaps almost unique among the many costumes that have ever been assumed since first masquerades were invented. It was that of the headsman. Arrayed in the garb of that dismal functionary, a rusty black velvet suit, with the breeches and black woollen stockings to match, the masker might yet have failed to inform those who saw him of the character he wished to portray, had it not been for at least one other accessory. On his back, strapped across it, he carried the long, narrow-bladed axe used for decapitation, its handle fringed and tasselled with leathern thongs. Yet there were other tokens also of the part he represented. In a girdle round his waistcoat he bore a formidable knife having a blade a foot long and an inch and a half deep--the knife with which the doomsman finished his ghastly task if the axe failed to do its duty, as had too often happened. His mask, too, was not that of the ordinary reveller at such places as this, not a mask made ostensibly to conceal the features, yet, as often as not, revealing them almost as clearly as though it had not been assumed; instead, it was long and full, covering not only the eyes and the bridge of the nose, but also the whole of the upper part of the face, and leaving only visible the lower jaw and the two ends of a thick brown moustache that hung below it. Alone by that moustache would Kitty have known the wearer, if by no other sign. It had been pressed too often against her own lips for her to forget it! Yet, also, would she have known him without it. His companion, the man who followed after him, was not so conspicuous by his appearance. He, indeed, wrapped in a long brown woollen cloak which descended to his shoes and must have been more than warm on such an evening as this, with at his side a Scotch claymore, or broadsword, and on his head a Scotch bonnet--the mask, of course, being worn--passed among the crowd as an excellent representative of their now despised and fallen enemies. Yet, had that crowd known that amongst them stalked in reality one whose prowess had been terribly conspicuous when exhibited against their own soldiers, they might not have gazed as approvingly as they now did on Douglas Sholto. As Kitty regarded these two figures--still trembling and feeling as though she were about to faint--she saw the eyes of the former one fix themselves upon her, and observed him hesitate for a moment ere continuing his course, then, in an instant, he went on again in the stream that continued to revolve round the orchestra pavilion. And she knew that a few moments would bring him again before her.