These two statesmen met, sternly and gravely, without a smile or bow. "Is all prepared?" asked Livingstone of the chancellor, in a low voice. "All," was the brief and emphatic reply. "Your men-at-arms?" "I have a hundred concealed in the tiring-room, which opens off the great hall." "Only a hundred! Are you not most rash?" "But they are men whose forefathers for ages have eaten the bread of mine." "You, then, deem them stedfast?" "Stedfast and true as Rippon steel; unyielding as flint. They are to rush forth under Achanna, when the signal appears." "Achanna," said the regent with contempt; "always Achanna. I know not how it is, but that man makes my blood to curdle." "He is a faithful----" "Villain," interrupted the regent, with irritation. "True--but such villains are useful," said the chancellor quietly. "And the signal is the black bull's head; but does not Achanna dine with us?" "Dine!" reiterated the chancellor, with a flashing eye and a quivering lip. "He will share the banquet at all events." "And the four bodies," said Livingstone, gnawing the ends of his grisly moustache, and looking aside, "how mean you to dispose of them?" "Under that green turf, where even now the king is playing with his goshawk, they will sleep as soundly as if below a ton of marble in Melrose Abbey Kirk, among their lordly kin," replied the chancellor in a low whisper, and with a ghastly smile; "but hark! I hear trumpets in the streets; and here comes Gray, the Captain of the Guard." Accoutred as we saw him yesterday, in his plumed bassinet, with its camaile and chaplet, and his rich mail with its hanging sleeves of scarlet and yellow silk, Sir Patrick Gray, happily ignorant of the dire preparations of the two statesmen, and the mine they were about to spring, made a low bow to each, with some passing remark on the auspicious beauty of the day--for the weather was as common a topic in the time of James II. as in that of his descendant, Queen Victoria. "A cloud is coming anon, that may darken its close," said the regent, thoughtfully. The Captain of the Guard looked upward, but the sky was cloudless, then his eye swept the horizon in vain. "Yea, Sir Patrick," added the chancellor, who is reported to have used the same figurative language, "have you never observed that there are periods--times of our existence, when past, present, and future hopes seem to culminate in one?" "Under favour, my lord, I do not comprehend," replied the puzzled soldier, as he played with the buckle of his belt, and thought of Murielle Douglas. "Yes--when we seem to hold them all--the past, the present, and more especially _the future_, in our grasp, and yet may throw them all away. Now dost comprehend?" "Do you mean in affairs of love, my lord?"