Where is she ?" "In the small inner room, Excellency." "Good, then see that no one disturbs us, and--stay, when she goes out follow her and note her movements till you trace her home." The man saluted, and Montalvo passed upstairs into the inner room, carefully shutting both doors behind him.

The place was unlighted, but through the large stone-mullioned window the rays of the full moon poured brightly, and by them, seated in a straight-backed chair, Montalvo saw a draped form.

There was something forbidding, something almost unnatural, in the aspect of this sombre form perched thus upon a chair in expectant silence.

It reminded him--for he had a touch of inconvenient imagination--of an evil bird squatted upon the bough of a dead tree awaiting the dawn that it might go forth to devour some appointed prey.
"Is that you, Mother Meg ?" he asked in tones from which most of the jocosity had vanished.

"Quite like old times at The Hague--isn't it ?" The moonlit figure turned its head, for he could see the light shine upon the whites of the eyes.
"Who else, Excellency," said a voice hoarse and thick with rheum, a voice like the croak of a crow, "though it is little thanks to your Excellency.