a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen, flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the shore side no light illumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in what he fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless in the chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance on which Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.

Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observation of anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenest interest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as it reached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo had left open.

What had been a crêpe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. The corridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was like a wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a door somewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment a gleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately by a hurried step coming down the stair.

At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, but the masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.

"M. le Baron," he concluded, "and home before me by another route," and he stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give passage. But the darkness made identity impossible, and he waited the recognition of himself. It never came. He was brushed past as by a somnambulist, without greeting or question, though to accomplish it the other in the narrow stairway had to rub clothes with him. Something utterly unexpected in the apparition smote him with surprise and apprehen

sion.

It was as if he had encountered something

groping in a mausoleum-something startling to the superstitious instinct, though not terrific in a material way. When it passed he stood speechless on the stair, looking down into the profound black, troubled with amazement, full of speculation. All the suspicions that he had felt last night, when the signal-calls rose below the turret and the door had opened and the flageolet had disturbed his slumbers, came back to him more sinister, more compelling than before. He listened to the declining footfall of that silent mystery; a whisper floated upwards, a door creaked, no more than that, and yet the effect was wildly disturbing, even to a person of the sang froid of Montaiglon.

At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood a space on the floor, lost in thought. When he looked at his face, half unconscious that he did so, in a little mirror on a table he saw revealed there no coward terrors, but assuredly alarm. He smiled at his pallid image, tugged in Gascon manner at his moustache, and threw out his chest; then his sense of humour came to him, and he laughed at the folly of his perturbation. But he did not keep the mood long.

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My sans culottes surely do not share the hospitality of Doom with me in its owner's absence,' he reflected. "And yet, and yet! I owe Bethune something for the thrill of the experiences he has introduced me to. Now I comprehend the affection of those weeping exiles for the very plain and commonplace life of France they profess to think so indifferent a country compared with this they have left behind. A week of these ghosts would drive me to despair. To-morrow-to-morrowM. de Montaiglon, - to-morrow you make your reluctant adieux to Doom and its inexplicable owner, whose surprise and innuendo are altogether too exciting."

So he promised himself as he walked up and down the floor of his chamber, feeling himself in a cage,

yet unable to think how he was to better his condition without the aid of the host whose mysteries disturbed so much by the suspicions they aroused. Bethune had told him Lamond, in spite of his politics and his comparative poverty, was on neighbourly terms with Argyll, and would thus be in a position to put him in touch with the castle of the Duke and the retinue there without creating any suspicion as to the nature of his mission. It was that he had depended on, and to no other quarter could he turn with a hope of being put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom was apparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, at variance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuits with which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesome old manner with the sword, indulged their contestful passions, and he presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his most hopeless moments had never allowed for-he did not know the identity of the man sought for, and he questioned if it could easily be established. All these considerations determined Count Victor upon an immediate removal from this starven castle and this suspicious host. But when he joined Doom in the salle he constrained his features to a calm reserve, showing none of his emotions.

He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciously loud but abstracted interest in his ramble.

"Well, Count," said he, "ye've seen the castle o' the King o' the Hielan's, as we call him, have you? And what think ye of MacCailen's quarters?"

Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at his interrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessed them charming.

A bitter smile came on the face of his host. "They might well be that," said he. "There's many a picking there." And then he became garrulous upon the tale of his house and family,

that seemed to have been dogged by misfortune for a century and a half; that had owned once many of these lush glens, the shoulders of these steep bens, the shores of that curving coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed off in successive generations, lost to lust, to the gambler's folly, the spendthrift's weakness.

"Hard, is it not?" questioned his host.

"I'm

the man that should have Doom at its very best, for I could bide among my people here, and like them, and make them like me, without a thought of rambling about the world. 'Mildewing with a ditch between you and life,' my grandfather used to call it when old age took him back from his gaieties abroad. Faith! I wish I had the chance to do it better than I may. All's here I ever wanted of life, and I have tasted it elsewhere too. Give me my own acres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeed from the rise of the sun till bedtimea short day and a happy. My father used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point of Strone where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in the port down - by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood of him. he saw a light out there at sea-the lamp of a ship outbound, he would stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As for me, no shiplight gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star coming up above the hill Ardno."

If

"To-morrow," said Montaiglon-" to-morrow is another day; that's my consolation in every trial." "At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that," admitted Doom; "at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it."

Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that sometimes swept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back and back at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him, he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plotting something?

And

with whom? What was the secret of that windblown castle, its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning there, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrilling moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway; but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless of reading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room for some clue to what he found nowhere else.

A chamber plain to meanness there seemed nothing here to help him to a solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangy and dusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a window only sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentious interior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dogeared documents of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a downfallen house had come about.

Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile..

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"Ay!" he said, "that's the ashes of Doom, all that's left of what we burned in fiery living and hot law-pleas. We have the ash and the others have warm hands."

Count Victor, who had been warming his chilled fingers at the fire, moved to the curtain and drew it back, the better again to see that doleful cinerary

urn.

His host rose hurriedly from his chair.

"Trash! trash! Only trash, and dear bought at that," said he, seeing his guest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness.

But the deed was done before the implied protest was attended. The Count's movements revealed a