Many of the candles had guttered to the socket and gone out; only two or three, burning ghostly before the tall mirrors, remained to cast a light through the darkened room. Silence and loneliness were abroad; the Countess gazed up at the infinite distance of the stars and shivered through her slender body; against the sky rose a misty vision often seen by her: the vision of a man with a beautiful face and clothes clay-stained and bloody, holding a lace cravat and looking at her with mournful eyes. She smiled bitterly as she thought of the uselessness of that blood on her soul; Jerome Caryl might have lived. An obscure traitor had informed and the plot to be carried out at Turnham Green had come to nothing. She turned from the stars and her eyes sought her husband. “Jock!” she cried, and there was a world of tenderness, of appeal, of passion in her voice. “Jock!” She crossed the great shadowy room to where he sat and went on her knees beside him. “I did it for ye,” she murmured, as if answering an accusation. “Jock—I hae served ye weel?” He took her hands in his and smiled down at her. “Peggy, ye ken vera weel ye are all the world to me,” he said most tenderly. Her head drooped against his arm. “Then I dinna care for onything,” she whispered. “Yet at times I’m no’ sae brave—I’m afraid.” Breadalbane’s wide light eyes gazed across the dark. “Afraid o’ what, Peggy?” She drew a little closer to him. “Of wraiths—o’ the dead.” He smiled, fondling her hair. “I wad’na’ fear when dead what I had’na’ feared when living, Peggy.” “Nay, nay, I dinna fear—at least I’m no’ afraid, Jock, when ye are close—but—Ah, Jock—wad I could forget!” He frowned above his smile. “Are ye thinking of the Macdonalds, Peggy?” With a little uneasy movement she lifted her head; her long throat gleamed unnaturally white above her dark dress. “Sometimes—I—think o’ the Macdonalds.” Breadalbane laughed as if he cast aside some foolish fancy. “We hae triumphed ower the Macdonalds, Peggy—the auld thief Makian got his deserts.” “Yea, I ken.” “And Ronald Macdonald—ye hated him, Peggy.” “I ken,” she said hastily, with yearning eyes on his face. “I wad I might forget.” “Wherefore, Peggy?” “Ah!—sleeping and waking—I see it—the Glen o’ Weeping—as I rode through it that day wi’ the smoke drifting ower the corpses—and the bitter dawn a-breaking—the bluid ower the heather and the silence, the silence.” With a half-shudder her eyes drooped and her clasp of his arm tightened. “This is fules’ talk,” said Breadalbane imperiously. “Sic sights are common in the Hielands—ye ken vera weel—the Campbells hae fed the eagles often enow—I shouldna’ hae thought that ye, Peggy, wad hae sickened at the bluid o’ the Macdonalds.” “I dinna—but—I canna forget.” Breadalbane’s eyes flashed.