The stairs were steep, there was little light upon the road, the balusters looked like rows of brown, square-faced soldiers. Not now, however, was there room for thoughts of Barbe Bleue, that French ogre, who was possibly hanging the last but one of his wives at that moment in the linen-press, nor of the terrible Kelpie of the Flow, which might that evening have left its Scottish loch and be looking in, with its horse face, at the staircase window. No, the chief terror was really Elspeth, who would certainly snatch him swiftly back to bed, not comprehending (nor he either, for that matter) how it was she who had started him on the path of this fear. So he went down as quickly as one foot at a time permitted, knowing that Grandpapa would be safe and busy in his study, and that Baptiste, his father's old body-servant, was, if met, more likely to forward him in his journey than to hinder him. He would, in fact, have been rather glad to encounter that elderly slave of his as he made his solitary way down to the dining-room, past the descending row of antlers and dirks and lairds of Glenauchtie in their wigs and tartan. CHAPTER II AND IS PUT BACK AGAIN (1) But on the dining-room wall it was Janet Elphinstone, a fair-haired child of ten, in a long white dress girt with a blue sash, her arm over the neck of a deerhound, who looked down at the guests assembled round her father's table. Not one was of her own nationality, for Mr. Elphinstone himself had withdrawn after supper, following his custom on similar occasions, and was by now very tolerably engrossed, as usual, with his memoirs. His national shrewdness made him perfectly aware that some of his friends, and probably all of his domestics except Baptiste, esteemed that in his unfailing hospitality to his son-in-law's unfortunate compatriots he was allowing himself to be victimised by a pack of starveling adventurers, as he had once heard them called; but he considered that his conduct in this regard was no one's affair but his own, and for several of the Marquis's friends he had a great respect--they bore misfortune so gallantly. So he scratched away contentedly in the library, while in the dining-room René talked to his companions.