“Yes, I perceive,” said the duke, dryly.

“And your grace will not be inconvenienced, I hope,” said the chief, as he bowed and placed a folded paper in the duke’s hand.

It was a subpoena commanding the recipient, under certain pains and penalties, to render himself at the Town Hall of Bannff as a witness for the Crown, in the approaching trial of John Potts, alias Abraham Peters, and Rose Cameron.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS

When the emissary of Rose Cameron had gone, the young Duchess of Hereward, in a whirlwind of long-repressed excitement, slammed, locked and bolted all the doors leading from her apartments into the hall, and then fled into her dressing-room and cast herself head long down upon the floor in the collapse of utter, infinite despair—­despair in all its depth of darkness, without its benumbing calmness!

Her soul was shaken by a tempest of warring passions!  Amazement, indignation, grief, horror, raged through her agonized bosom!

It was well that no human eye beheld her in this deep degradation of woe!  For in the madness of her anguish, she rolled on the floor, and tore the clothing from her shoulders and the dark hair from her head!  She uttered such groans and cries as are seldom heard on this earth—­such as perhaps fill the murky atmosphere of hell.  She impiously called on Heaven to strike her dead as she lay!  She was indeed on the very brink of raving insanity.

There was but one thought that held her reason on its throne—­the necessity of immediate flight and escape—­escape from the man whom she had just vowed at the altar to love, honor, and obey until death—­the man whom she had worshiped as an archangel!

The man?—­the fiend, rather!

What had she just now found him proved to be?

Yes proved to be, beyond the merciful possibility of a saving doubt!—­proved to be by the most overwhelming and convicting testimony, corroborated also by the evidence of her own eyes and ears, too long discredited for his sake.

Her eyes had seen him lurking stealthily in the dark hall, near her father’s bedroom door, late on the night of that father’s murder.  She had spoken to him, and at the sound of her voice he had shrunk silently out of sight.

Yet she had discredited the evidence of her own eyes, and persuaded herself that she had been the subject of an optical illusion.

Her ears had heard a part of his midnight conversation with his female confederate under the balcony—­had heard his prediction that something would happen that night to prevent the marriage that he promised her should never take place—­a prediction so awfully fulfilled in the morning by the discovery of the dead body of her murdered father!  She had fainted at the sound of his voice, uttering such treacherous and cruel words; yet on her return to consciousness she had disbelieved the evidence of her own ears, and convinced herself that she had been the victim of a nightmare dream!