Doom coldly, resenting the irony. afterwards."

"I'll explain

"Positively there is no necessity," replied Count Victor with a profound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.

There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had seen the bulge of the dagger below Lamond's plaid, and the plaid itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his candles, and throwing himself upon his bed lay waiting for the signal he expected. In spite of himself sleep stole on him twice, and he awakened each time to find an hour was gone.

Great drops beat

It was a night of pouring rain. on the little window, a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor in that welter of midnight voices to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair-the sound of a door. softly closed and a bar run in deep channels-decided him, and he waited to confound the master of Doom.

In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon his heart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword. A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, but left the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front of his door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was not the Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had any reason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered each other simultaneously, she, a handsome foreigner fumbling to put a rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this savage domicile.

In his after-years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her eyes had first given him. the embarrassment that kept him dumb in her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes-the eyes of the woman born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet always inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise that told him first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the average of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; instead there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely low.

"Madame; pardon! I-I-was awakened by music, and-"

Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature of the rencontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to a bolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.

"I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame's permission I shall return to earth."

His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully understand, for she hesitated more than a moment as if pondering, not a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count Victor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt that there were lines upon his face betraying him.

"I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance," she said at last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain melody but adding to the charm of her accent.

Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by this sang froid where he might naturally have looked for perturbation.

"Pardon, I demand your pardon!" was all that he could say, looking at the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze, instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so doing.

He had the woman there!

"Pardon," he repeated. "It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know"-he smiled the smile of the flâneur-"I did not know it was, let me say Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I hope Orpheus will not enrheum himself by his serenading."

Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled-an in

describable thing, but a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor in that haughty instinct of her flesh and eye saw that here was not the place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue Beautreillis.

"I fear I have not intruded for the first time," he went on, in a different tone. "It must have been your chamber I somewhat unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to meat least I had come to consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here."

"It is easily explained," said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.

"There is positively not the necessity," protested Count Victor, realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.

she went on.

"But you must understand thatAgain he interrupted as courteously as he might. "The explanation is due from me, madame: I protest," said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now. France, far-off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy waters-but this, but this was Paradise!

"The explanation must be mine," said he. "I

was prying upon no amour, but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions."

"They were, perhaps, connected with my father," she said, with a divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.

"Your father!" he exclaimed, astonished that one more of his misconceptions should be thus dispelled. "Then I have been guilty of the unpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess."

"A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the blackaffronted woman," said she, "but through no fault of mine. I am in my own good father's house, and still, in a way, a stranger in it, and that is a hard thing. But you must not distrust my father: you will find, I think, before very long, that all the odd affairs in this house have less to do with him than with his daughter Olivia."

She blushed again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitiveness that Count Victor found perfectly entrancing.

"My dear mademoiselle," he said, wishing the while he had had a friseur at the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran his fingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curled above his brow," my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fool and a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to your annoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom of proffering an adequate apology."

He expected her to leave him then, and he had a foot retired, preparing to re-enter his room, but there was a hesitancy in her manner that told him she had something more to say. She bit her nether lip the orchards of Cammercy, he told himself, never bred a cherry a thousandth part so rich and so inviting even to look at in candle-light; a shy dubiety hovered round her eyes. He waited her pleasure to speak.

"Perhaps," said she softly, relinquishing her brave demeanour-" perhaps it might be well that—that