“Bide here a moment,” said Clerk Henriet, bending his body in a writhing contortion to listen to what might be going on inside the chamber; “I dare not take you in till I see whether my lord be in good case to receive you.”

So at the stair-head, by a window lattice which looked towards the chapel, Laurence stood and waited.  At first he kept quite still and listened with pleasure to the distant singing of the boys.  He could even hear Precentor Renouf occasionally stop and rebuke them for inattention or singing out of tune.

    “My soul is like a watered garden,
      And I shall not sorrow any more at all!”

So he hummed as he listened, and beat the time on the ledge with his fingers.  He felt singularly content.  Now he was on the eve of penetrating the mystery.  At last he would discover where the missing maidens were concealed.

But soon he began to look about him, growing, like the boy he was, quickly weary of inaction.  His eye fell upon a strange door with curious marks burnt upon its panels apparently by hot irons.  There were circles complete and circles that stopped half-way, together with letters of some unknown language arranged mostly in triangles.

This door fixed the lad’s attention with a certain curious fascination.  He longed to touch it and see whether it opened, but for the moment he was too much afraid of his guide’s return to summon him into the presence of the marshal.

He listened intently.  Surely he heard a low sound, like the wind in a distant keyhole—­or, as it might be (and it seemed more like it), the moaning of a child in pain, it knows not why.

The heart of the youth gave a sudden leap.  It came to him that he had hit upon the hiding-place of Margaret Douglas, the heiress of the great province of Galloway.  His fortune was made.

With a trembling hand he moved a step towards the door of white wood with the curious burned marks upon it.  He stood a moment listening, half for the returning footsteps of Clerk Henriet, and half to the low, persistent whimper behind the panels.  Suddenly he felt his right foot wet, for, as was the fashion, he wore only a velvet shoe pointed at the toe.  He looked down, and lo! from under the door trickled a thin stream of red.

Laurence drew his foot away, with a quick catching sob of the breath.  But his hand was already on the door, and at a touch it appeared to open almost of its own accord.  He found himself looking from the dusk of the outer whitewashed passage into a high, vaulted chapel, wherein many dim lights glimmered.  At the end there was a great altar of iron standing square and solemn upon the platform on which it was set up, and behind it, cut indistinctly against a greenish glow of light, and imagined rather than clearly defined, the vast statue of a man with a curiously high shaped head.  Laurence could not distinguish any features, so deep was the gloom, but the whole figure seemed to be bending slightly forward, as if gloating upon that which was laid upon the altar.  But what struck Laurence with a sense of awe and terror was the fact that as the greenish light behind waxed and waned, he could see shadowy horns which projected from either side of the forehead, and lower, short ears, pricked and shaggy like those of a he-goat.