ugh the mind of Donal, as he sat half consciously waiting for the
dawn. It was thousands of miles away, over the great round of the
sunward-turning earth! His imagination woke, and began to picture the
great hunt of the shadows, fleeing before the arrows of the sun, over
the broad face of the mighty world--its mountains, seas, and plains in
turn confessing the light, and submitting to him who slays for them the
haunting demons of their dark. Then again the moments were the small
cogs on the wheels of time, whereby the dark castle in which he sat was
rushing ever towards the light: the cogs were caught and the wheels
turned swiftly, and the time and the darkness sped. He forgot the
labour of waiting. If now and then he fancied a tone through the
darkness, it was to his mind the music-march of the morning to his
rescue from the dungeon of the night.

But that was no musical tone which made the darkness shudder around
him! He sprang to his feet. It was a human groan--a groan as of one
in dire pain, the pain of a soul's agony. It seemed to have descended
the stair to him. The next instant Donal was feeling his way
up--cautiously, as if on each succeeding step he might come against the
man who had groaned. Tales of haunted houses rushed into his memory.
What if he were but pursuing the groan of an actor in the past--a
creature the slave of his own conscious memory--a mere haunter of the
present which he could not influence--one without physical relation to
the embodied, save in the groans he could yet utter! But it was more
in awe than in fear that he went. Up and up he felt his way, all about
him as still as darkness and the night could make it. A ghostly cold
crept through his skin; it was drawn together as by a gently freezing
process; and there was a pulling at the muscles of his chest, as if his
mouth were being dragged open by a martingale.

As he felt his way along the wall, sweeping its great endless circle
round and round in spiral ascent, all at once his hand seemed to go
through it; he started and stopped. It was the door of the room into
which he had been shown to meet the earl! It stood wide open. A faint
glimmer came through the window from the star-filled sky. He stepped
just within the doorway. Was not that another glimmer on the
floor--from the back of the room--through a door he did not remember
having seen yesterday? There again was the groan, and nigh at hand!
Someone must be in sore need