drew a key
from his pocket and fitted it in the lock. The gate swung back and he
passed inside. The old house looked gray and forbidding in the dull
light of the late afternoon. He frowned up at it, and it frowned down on
him, standing there as cold and grim as itself. That was his
only welcome.

The doors and windows were all shut, so that he caught only a faint
sound of the bump, thump of the scrubbing-brush as it accompanied
Henri's high-pitched tune down the back stairs.

Without giving any warning of his arrival, he motioned the man beside
the coachman to follow with his trunk, and silently led the way
up-stairs. When the trunk had been unstrapped and the man had departed,
monsieur gave one slow glance all around the room. It was in perfect
readiness for him. He set a match to the kindling laid in the grate, and
then closed the door into the hall. The master had come home again, more
silent, more mysterious in his movements than before.

Henri finished his scrubbing and his song, and, going down into the
kitchen, began preparations for supper. A long time after, Jules came up
from the field, put the goats in their place, and crept in behind the
kitchen stove.

Then it was that Joyce, from her watch-tower of her window, saw Brossard
driving home in the market-cart. "Maybe I'll have a chance to scare him
while he is putting the horse up and feeding it," she thought. It was in
the dim gloaming when she could easily slip along by the hedges without
attracting attention. Bareheaded, and in breathless haste to reach the
barn before Brossard, she ran down the road, keeping close to the hedge,
along which the wind raced also, blowing the dead leaves almost as high
as her head.

Slipping through a hole in the hedge, just as Brossard drove in at the
gate, she ran into the barn and crouched down behind the door. There she
wrapped herself in the sheet that she had brought with her for the
purpose, and proceeded to strike a match to light the lantern. The first
one flickered and went out. The second did the same. Brossard was
calling angrily for Jules now, and she struck another match in nervous
haste, this time touching the wick with it before the wind could
interfere. Then she drew her dress over the lantern to hide the light.

"Wouldn't Jack enjoy this," she thought, with a daring little giggle
that almost betrayed her hiding-place.

"I tell thee it is thy fault," cried Brossard's angry voice, drawing
nearer the ba