more perturbing was the sudden recollection of the amused laughter that had greeted his barefooted approach to Doom through two or three inches of water, and at the open door he hung back dubious.

"Step in; it's your ain room," cried Mungo, struggling with his kettle; "and for the Lord's sake mind your mainners and gie her a guid impression."

It was the very counsel to make a Montaiglon bold.

He entered; a woman was busy at the open window; he stared in amazement and chagrin.

CHAPTER XII.

OMENS AND ALARMS.

BEATEN back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound silence on the shore and all along the coasta silence the more sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle, his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads; it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor

scrutinised the ground beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled. husky in its chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead.

He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere else the desolation was pitiful-the hips glowing crimson on their stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green with damp and the base growths of old and mouldering situations, the seat decayed and broken, but propped at its feet as if for recent use. All seemed to express some poignant anguish for lost summers, happy days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the rain and sea saddened the moment-the rain dripping through the ragged foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw.

He held high the lantern, and to a woman at her darkened window her bower seemed to glow like a shell lit in the depths of troubled ocean. He swung the light; a footstep, that he did not hear, was checked in wonder. He came out, and instinct told him some one watched him in the dark beyond the radiance of his lantern.

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Qui est la?" he cried, forgetting again the foreign country, thinking himself sentinel in homely camps, and when he spoke a footstep sounded in the darkness.

G

Some one had crossed from the mainland while he ruminated within. He listened, with the lantern high above his head but to the right of him for fear of a pistol-shot.

One footstep.

He advanced slowly to meet it, his fingers tremulous on his sword, and the Baron came out of the darkness, his hands behind his back, his shoulders bent, his visage a mingling of sadness and wonder.

"M. le Baron?" said Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer. Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that showed him for the moment incapable of calm utterance.

"You-you-are late," stammered Count Victor, putting the sword behind him and feeling his words grotesque.

"I took-I took you for a wraith-I took you for a vision," said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. "Oh, man!" said he, "if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from things new and thriving, and above all the castle of his Grace flaring from foundation to finial like a torch, though murder was done this day in the guise of justice: I came through the rain and the wet full of bitterness to my poor black home, and find no light there where once my father and my father's father and all the race of us knew pleasant hours in the wildest weather. Not a light, not a lowe" he went on, gazing upward to the frowning walls dark glistening in the rain-"and then the bower must out and shine to mind me to mind me-ah, Montaiglon, my pardons, my regrets! you must be finding me a melancholy host.'

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Do not mention it," said Count Victor carelessly, though the conduct of this marvel fairly bewildered him, and his distress seemed poorly

accounted for by his explanation.

"Ah, vieux blagueur!" he thought, "can it be Balhaldie again -a humbug with no heart in his breast but an onion in his handkerchief? And then he was ashamed of suspicions of which a day or two ago he would have been incapable.

"My dear friends of Monday did me the honour to call in your absence," he said. "They have not

gone more than twenty minutes."

"What! the Macfarlanes," cried Doom, every trace of his softer emotion gone, but more disturbed than ever as he saw the sword for the first time. "Well-well-well?" he inquired eagerly. "Well? well? well?" and he gripped Count Victor by the arm and looked him in the eyes.

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'Nothing serious happened," replied Count Victor, "except that your domestics suffered some natural alarms."

Doom seemed wondrously relieved. "They did not force an entrance?" said he.

"They did their best, but failed. I pricked one slightly before I fell back on Mungo's barricades; that and some discomfiture from Mistress Annapla's punch-bowl completed the casualties."

"Well? well? well?" cried Lamond, still waiting something. Count Victor only looked at him in wonder, and led the way to the door where Mungo drew back the bars and met his master with a trembling front. A glance of mute inquiry and intelligence passed between the servant and his master: the Frenchman saw it and came to his own conclusions, but nothing was said till the Baron had made a tour of investigation through the house and come at last to join his guest in the salle, where the embers of the fire were raked together on the hearth and fed with new peat. The Count and his host sat down together, and when Mungo had gone to prepare some food for his master, Count Victor narrated the night's adventure. He had an excited listener-one more