mp 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.

"_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.

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 wa