he to himself. "The key
of the mystery lies between him and this absurd Baron, and I begin
to guess at something of complicity on the part of M. Bethune. A
malediction on the whole tribe of mountaineers! The thing's like a play;
I've seen far more improbable circumstances in a book. I am shot at in
a country reputed to be well-governed even to monotony; a sombre host
puzzles, a far too frank domestic perplexes; magic flutes and midnight
voices haunt this infernal hold; the conventional lady of the drama is
kept in the background with great care, and just when I am on the point
of meeting her, the perplexing servitor becomes my jailer. But yes,
it is a play; surely it is a play; or else I am in bed in Cammercy
suffering from one of old Jeanne's heavy late suppers. It is then that I
must waken myself into the little room with the pink hangings."

He raised the point of the sword to prick his finger, more in a humorous
mood than with any real belief that it was all a dream, and dropped it
fast as he felt a gummy liquor clotting on the blade.

"_Grand Dieu!_" said he softly, "I have perhaps pricked some one else
to-night into his eternal nightmare, and I cannot prick myself out of
one."

The noise of the men outside rose louder; a gleam of light waved upon
the wall of the chamber, something wan and elusive, bewildering for
a moment as if it were a ghost; from the clamour he could distinguish
sentences in a guttural tongue. He turned to the window--the counterpart
of the one in his own bedroom, but without a pane of glass in its narrow
space. Again the wan flag waved across the wall, more plainly the cries
of the robbers came up to him. They had set a torch flaring on the
scene. It revealed the gloomy gable-end of Doom with a wild, a menacing
illumination, deepening the blackness of the night beyond its influence,
giving life to shadows that danced upon rock and grass. The light, held
high by the man Count Victor had wounded, now wrapped to his eyes in
a plaid, rose and fell, touched sometimes on the mainland showing the
bracken and the tree, sometimes upon the sea to show the wave, frothy
from its quarrel with the fissured rock, making it plain that Doom was a
ship indeed, cast upon troubled waters, cut off from the gentle world.

But little for the sea or for the shore had Count Victor any interest;
his eyes were all for the wild band who clamoured about the flambeau.
They wore such a costume as he had quarrelled with