The music he had heard in his sleep was filling every part of the convent, announcing that morning matins had begun. Stuart sprang from the couch, troubled with his visions and unrefreshed by his slumbers. He hastily donned his regimentals, and entering the chapel, seated himself in that part which was separated from the nuns by a strong, but richly gilt iron railing. He was surveyed with no small interest by the sequestered sisterhood, to whom it was an uncommon event to have within their walls a male guest, so different from the bearded and shorn priests who came as privileged individuals. A handsome young soldado, wearing the martial garb of a land which was, in their ideas of geography, at an immense distance, and of which they had strange notions, especially of the ferocity and wildness of its mountaineers, was an object of thrilling interest to these timid creatures, who trembled at the very mention of the dangers which their military guest had seen and dared. He was very different from Pietro, their deformed gardener, or El Pastor, that budget of proverbs, who was their daily visitor; and many bright and beautiful eyes, though screened by hood of serge and veil of lawn, were fixed searchingly upon him from the organ-loft and altar-steps; but their presence was unheeded and uncared-for by Stuart, whose eyes were bent on the grey slab in the centre of the chancel, while his thoughts were with the cold and coffinless form that lay beneath it, bruised and crushed down in that dark and gloomy hole under a load of earth. It was not until the matins were ended and the sisters had withdrawn, that he remembered where he was, and that the sooner he prepared to rejoin his regiment and apologize for his singular absence the better. Indeed he had begun to feel some most unpleasant qualms and doubts as to the issue of the matter, with so strict a commanding-officer as Cameron of Fassifern,—_the chief_, as he was named by the mess; and visions of a general court-martial,—a formidable array of charges, and a sentence to be cashiered, "a sentence of which His Majesty is most graciously pleased to approve," arose before him.