"Once, I promise you, once ere we leave Bommel, on the _third_ evening from this, at the _same_ hour," said the abbot, hurrying Murielle away, for at that moment several Flemish ecclesiastics entered the church. As Gray wished to avoid every one, he withdrew; but resolved that, come what might of it, in his next interview with Murielle, to save her from the perils that were impending. She still loved him truly, and there was every consolation in the knowledge that she did so; yet her love would not save her from Albany when Douglas chose to play the tyrant. But the abbot's _protégé_, the serpent, was abroad, and there were many mischiefs to be plotted and many to be worked ere Murielle could be saved from her persecutors. As she and the abbot passed through the postern door which opened from one of the aisles into the garden of the Dyck Graf--a door over which there may be seen to this day, a strange sculpture of a mitred cat preaching to twelve little mice--a man who had evidently been listening shrunk back into the shade. This person was the somewhat ubiquitous James Achanna, who, inspired alike by impatience and malevolence, repaired immediately to his lord and chief the earl. CHAPTER XXXIII. HOUSE OF THE DYCK GRAF. With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do indescribable mischief.--WASHINGTON IRVING. While the lonely Sir Patrick Gray, full of sombre and exciting thoughts, retired to his hostelry to consider and to plan the deliverance of Murielle from her own family, the house of Messire Jacques de Lalain, the Dyck Graf or hereditary governor of Bommel, which had been assigned as a temporary residence to the powerful Scottish noble and his retinue, became brilliantly lighted up. In the principal chamber were grouped together many of the personages whom we last saw together, at the abbot's house in Edinburgh, on that eventful evening of November, 1440. It was noble in aspect, loftily ceiled, and floridly decorated in the Flemish fashion of that age of profusion, the walls and roof being covered with quaint devices and heraldic blazons, by Jan Van Eyck, a native of Maeseyk, who, in 1410, attained great perfection in the mixing of oil colours. Within a fireplace, lined with Dutch tiles, blazed a pile of logs across the massive bar of the and-irons. On an oaken buffet stood a gigantic lion, formed entirely of Delft ware, the crest of Gueldres, as it sprang from a ducal crown. From the ceiling hung a gilded chandelier, a veritable pyramid of candles, which shed a flood of light upon the guests below.