not fear to
direct."

"Ay, ay," muttered the baronet, "I'd go with you, my darling, to the
world's end; but there's that young philosopher of mine breaking his
heart for you. And when all's said and done, it's the young fellow
that'll be the most use to you, I reckon. Ay, you've chosen already,
I'll be bound. The gouty old man had best stop at home. Ho, ho, ho!
You've the luck, Adrian; more luck than you deserve."

"It is I who have more luck than I deserve," answered Madame de
Savenaye, smiling upon her young knight as, taking heart of grace, he
stooped to seal the treaty upon her hand. "To say the truth, I had
hoped for this, yet hardly dared to allow myself to count upon it. And
really, uncle, you give your own son to my cause?--and you, cousin,
you are willing to work for me? I am indeed strengthened at the outset
of my undertaking. I shall pray that you may never have cause to
regret your chivalrous goodness."

She dropped Adrian's hand with a faint pressure, and moved sighing
towards the door.

"Do you wonder that I have no tears, cousin?" she said, a little
wistfully; "they must gather in my heart till I have time to sit down
and shed them."

Thus it was that a letter penned by this unknown M. de Puisaye from
some hidden fastness in the Bocage of Brittany came to divert the
course of Adrian Landale's existence into a channel where neither he,
nor any of those who knew him, would ever have dreamed to see it
drift.

CHAPTER V

THE AWAKENING

Oh, what hadst thou to do with cruel Death,
Who wast so full of life, or Death with thee?

LONGFELLOW.

Sir Adrian Landale, in his sea-girt fastness, still absorbed in dreams
of bygone days, loosed his grasp of faithful Rene's shoulder and fell
to pacing the chamber with sombre mien; while Rene, to whom these fits
of abstraction in his master were not unfamiliar, but yet to his
superstitious peasant soul, eerie and awe-inspiring visitations,
slipped unnoticed from his presence.

The light-keeper sate down by his lonely hearth and buried his gaze in
the glowing wood-embers, over which, with each fitful thundering rush
of wind round the chimney, fluttered little eddies of silvery ash.

So, that long strife was over, which had wrought such havoc to the
world, had shaped so dismally the course of his own life! The monster
of selfish ambition, the tyrannic, insatiable conqueror whose very
existence had so long made peaceable pursuits unprofitabl