Sholto bowed without speech, and hastening down to the guardroom he commanded two of his best bowmen to follow him with their apparatus, while he himself snatched up the low truckle couch which custom assigned to the captain of the guard should he desire to rest himself during the night, and on which Landless Jock had always passed the majority of his hours of duty.  This he carried to the Earl, and placing it in the angle he saw his youthful master stretch himself upon it, wrapped in his cloak and with a naked sword ready to his hand.

“A good and undisturbed slumber to you, my lord,” said Sholto, curtly, as he went out.

He saw that his two men were duly posted upon the lower landing of the stair, and then betook himself to the upper floor where slept the little Maid of Galloway.

He walked slowly to the end of the passage scrutinising every recess and closet door, every garde-robe and wall press from which it was possible that the beast he had seen might have emerged.  He was wholly unsuccessful in discovering anything suspicious, and had almost resolved to station himself at the turn of the staircase which led down from the roof, when, looking back, at the sharp click of a latch, he saw Maud Lindesay coming out of the chamber of the little Maid of Galloway.

Softly closing the door behind her, she paused a moment as if undecided, and then more with her chin than with her finger she beckoned him to approach.

“She sleeps,” said the girl, softly, “but so uncertainly and with so many startings of terror, that I will not leave her alone.  Will you aid me to remove the mattress of my couch and lay it on the floor beside her?”

Sholto signified his willingness.  His mind was more than ever oppressed by the thought that the Earl of Douglas loved this girl, whom he had found listening to his jests with such frank joyousness.

Maud stayed him with one of the long looks out from under her eyelashes.  The dark violet orbs rested upon him a moment reproachfully with a hurt expression in their depths, and were then dropped with a sigh.

“You are still angry with me,” she said, a little wistfully, “and I wanted to tell you how happy it made me—­made us, I mean—­when we heard that you were to be captain of the castle-guard instead of that grumbling old curmudgeon, Jock of Abernethy.”

The heart of Sholto was instantly melted, more by her looks than by her words, though deep within him he had still an angry feeling that he was being played with.  All the same, and in spite of his resolves, the eyeshot from under those dark and sweeping lashes did its usual and deadly work.

“I did not know that aught which might befall me could be anything to Mistress Maud Lindesay,” said Sholto, with the last shreds of dignity in his voice.

“I said not to me, but to us,” she corrected, smiling; “but tell me what think you of this appearance which has so startled our Margaret.  Was it ghost or goblin or dream of the night?  We have never had either witch or warlock about the house of Thrieve since the old Abbot Gawain laid the ghost of Archibald the Grim with four-and-forty masses, said without ever breaking his fast, down there in the castle chapel.”