Le Blesois, still without a word spoken, left the room with the wet clothes over his arm.  As he did so a small object rolled from some fold or crevice of the doublet, where it had been safely lodged till displaced by the loosening of the belt, or the removing of the banderole of his master’s hunting horn.

Le Blesois turned at the tinkling sound, and would have stopped to lift it up after the manner of a careful servitor.  But the eye of his lord was upon the fallen object, and with an abrupt wave of his hand towards the door, and the single word “Go!” the Earl dismissed his body-servant from the room.

Then rising hastily from his chair, he took the trinket in his hand and carried it to the well-trimmed lamp which stood in a niche that held a golden crucifix.

The Lord Douglas saw lying in his palm a ring of singular design.  The main portion was formed of the twisting bodies of a pair of snakes, the jewel work being very cunningly interlaced and perfectly finished.  Their eyes were set with rubies, and between their open mouths they carried an opal, shaped like a heart.  The stone was translucent and faintly luminous like a moonstone, but held in its heart one fleck of ruby red, in appearance like a drop of blood.  By some curious trick of light, in whatever position the ring was held, this drop still appeared to be on the point of detaching itself and falling to the ground.

Earl William examined it in the flicker of the lamp.  He turned it every way, narrowly searching inside the golden band for a posy, but not a word of any language could he find engraved upon it.

“I saw the ring upon her hand—­I am certain I saw it on her hand!” He said these words over and over to himself.  “It is then no dream that I have dreamed.”

There came a low knocking at the door, a rustling and a whispering without.  Instantly the Earl thrust the ring upon his own finger with the opal turned inward, and, with the dark anger mark of his race strongly dinted upon his fair young brow, he faced the unseen intruder.

“Who is there?” he cried loudly and imperiously.

The door opened with a rasping of the iron latch, and a little girlish figure clothed from head to foot in a white night veil danced in.  She clapped her hands at sight of him.

“You are come back,” she cried; “and you have so fine a gown on too.  But Maud Lindesay says it is very wrong to be out of doors so late, even if you are Earl of Douglas, and a great man now.  Will you never play at ‘Catch-as-catch-can’ with David and me any more?”

“Margaret,” said the young Earl, “what do you away from your chamber at all?  Our mother will miss you, and I do not want her here to-night.  Go back at once!”

But the little wilful maiden, catching her skirts in her hands at either side and raising them a little way from the ground, began to dance a dainty pas seul, ending with a flashing whirl and a low bow in the direction of her audience.