flung the flambeau at the first who entered.

The light went out; he dropped at a boy's intuition upon a knee and
lowered his head. Over him in the darkness poured his assailants, too
close upon each other in their eagerness, and while they struggled
at the stair-foot he drew softly back. Out in the night Mungo wailed
lugubrious in the hands of some of his captors; within there was
a wonderful silence for a little, the baffled visitors recovering
themselves with no waste of words, and mounting the stair in pursuit of
the gentleman they presumed to have preceded them. When they were well
up, he went to the door and made it fast again, leaving Mungo to the
fate his stupidity deserved.

Doom's sleeping-chamber lay behind; he passed along the corridor
quickly, knocked at the door, got no answer, and entered.

It was as he had fancied--his host was gone, his couch had not been
occupied. A storm of passion swept through him; he felt himself that
contemptible thing, a man of the world betrayed by a wickedness that
ought to be transparent. They were in the plot then, master and man,
perhaps even--but no, that was a thought to quell on the moment of
its waking; she at least was innocent of all these machinations, and
upstairs now, she shared, without a doubt, the alarms of Annapla. That
familiar of shades and witches, that student of the fates, was a
noisy poltroon when it was the material world that threatened; she was
shrieking again.

"Loch Sloy! Loch Sloy!" now rose the voices overhead, surely the
maddest place in the world for a Gaelic slogan: it gave him a sense of
unspeakable savagery and antique, for it was two hundred years since his
own family had cried "Cammercy!" on stricken fields.

He paused a moment, irresolute.

A veritable farce! he thought. It would have been so much easier for his
host to hand him over without these play-house preliminaries.

But Olivia! but Olivia!

He felt the good impulse of love and anger, the old ichor of his
folk surged through his veins, and without a weapon he went upstairs,
trusting to his wits to deal best with whatever he would there
encounter.

It seemed an hour since they had entered; in truth it was but a minute
or two, and they were still in the bewildering blackness of the stair,
one behind another in its narrow coils, and seemingly wisely dubious of
too precipitate an advance. He estimated that they numbered less than
half a dozen when he came upon the rear-most o