"The poor leddy had been shut in her room all day, very low in her spirits, as though she mistrusted where her lord had gone. The rooms had all been new fitted for her with many beautiful ornaments and pictures, but she found no comfort in any thing. She sat by the fire with her babe hugged to her bosom till she heard her lord's horses in the court. Then she gave the babe to its nurse and ran down to meet him. He kissed her as she threw her arms round his neck, and bade his man show the leddy what he had brought her. The man threw down on the floor the carcass of a great gray wolf. The lady gave one scream—they said it echoed through the house—and fled to her bedroom, bolting herself in. She would na open to any one—not to her husband or her child—but they heard her wailing and crying fit to break her heart. "It was just midnight when those within the hall heard, as though close at hand, the long-drawn, piercing howl of a wolf. It was answered so near that the cry seemed within the very hall itself, and so dreadful was the sound that it made every one's blood run cold. My lord, who had come down stairs, ran up to his lady's room, thinking she would be terrified to death. He found the nurse, who watched by the sleeping babe, in the outer room stretched on the floor in a faint, but there was no sound from within. Reckless in his dread, he ordered the door to be broken in. The room was empty. The leddy's clothes that she had worn all day lay in a heap on the floor. The door to a little turnpike stair that led down to the garden was open, but, alive or dead, the poor leddy was never seen mair. "The babe seemed to pine for his mither, though she had never nursed him, and in a week, he too died, and was buried. The lord had the rooms which had been his wife's closed and locked just as she left them, and he went to the Holy Wars, as they called them, against the Turks, and never came home. The estate went to a cousin after all; but they say that when some great misfortune is about to happen to the family, the long howl of a wolf is heard at night in Highbeck Woods." Elsie ended her story and we sat a few moments in silence. Then Amabel remarked quietly— "I suppose those are the shut up rooms between this chamber and the king's room." "Aye, they have never been opened since, or sae they say, and a veil hangs always over the poor leddy's picture, though Mrs. Deborah's mother used think it was only a fancy piece, since nobody knew how to paint such pictures in those days. She was a very well-educated young leddy, was my young mistress, and had been at school at a convent in France."