For an instant, Walter Maxwell had to pause and collect his energies, manning himself as though about to undergo some formidable trial, when he found he was at least on the _outside_ of that door which he had contemplated such a weary while as the bar between himself and freedom. Stealthily, and with a keen sense of delight, so overpowering as to be almost painful, he pushed open the iron wicket at the foot of the staircase and emerged into the garden beyond. It was intoxicating to drink in the warm fragrance of the summer air at every pore. It was bewildering, from sheer delight, to feel the eyes ache in that dazzling sunshine, glowing on leaf and flower, whitening the gravel walk and the castle wall in its blinding glare. The prisoner paused in a corner of the passage ere he came forth, accustoming sight and faculties by degrees to the rapturous change. Then he stole out and looked about him, taking in, with keen and wary eye, the features of the surrounding scene. Well he knew that in such a stronghold as that of the powerful Rothes his escape had only just begun. He found himself in a beautiful little garden, neatly kept and tastefully laid out. Casting a hasty glance upward, he ascertained that he was overlooked by no windows from the castle; three sides of this parterre were bounded by the great blank walls of the house, the fourth was shut in by a dark impervious hedge of yews. With stealthy, hasty steps he was soon on the farther side of this leafy screen and traversing a bowling-green on which the bowls dotted the level surface at irregular intervals--denoting that a game had been recently interrupted--he emerged upon a beautiful little wilderness of shrubs and flowers beyond. Three or four vases and a fountain adorned this exterior pleasure-ground, and the gigantic beeches of Leslie, perhaps the finest trees of Scotland, shaded it with their dark gleaming foliage. It looked like a paradise to the emancipated prisoner; but, alas, a paradise from which there was no escape! Surrounded by the outer wall of the castle, any biped, unprovided with wings, seemed as much a captive in those sunny glades as in the darkest recesses of the dungeon. How Maxwell envied the butterfly soaring into the air so freely over that smooth and cruel wall! It would be hard to turn back now after tasting even for five minutes the delights of liberty. Casting about with anxious eyes and a fast-beating heart for some means, however desperate, of egress, he espied a portion of the masonry in which certain irregularities would admit of his climbing to within a few feet of the coping. At this very place, too, a friendly beech somewhat overhung the garden so that one of its branches drooped downwards inside the wall.