out
the Castle and compelled the ear to listen. It volleyed yelling through
the ravines, it roared among the lean pine-trees like the surf on an
open coast, it swept round the Castle walls in long-drawn infuriated
screaming that seemed charged with echoes of wild pain and remoteness
and fear. The narrow moon had long since sunk behind the rack of
storm-driven clouds, and left the mountains steeped in a tumultuous
milk-coloured darkness of snow and wind.

Within the massive walls the reception rooms were closed and empty at
last; the guests had separated and night had taken possession, but not
rest.

Valerie, alone in her room and oppressed by the vague infection of
wakefulness and fear, moved from window to window listening to the wild
noises that were abroad, and trying to reason herself out of the
conviction of coming danger, which held her from sleep.

She had thrown back the curtains from the windows. Her room occupied an
exposed corner of the Castle tower, which stood on the edge of the
gorge through which the Kofn chafed its way to the plains below the
Ford. A narrow strip of ground scarcely six feet in width alone
separated the wall of the tower from the precipice that fell sheer away
to the foaming water far below.

She tried to read but could not fix her attention. Her heart seemed in
her ears and answered to every sound.

And all the while in the scattered rooms and shadowy passages the drama
which involved her life was being slowly played out. Below on the ground
floor of the tower Elmur and Sagan sat together.

'By the way, my dear Count, have you ever thought of the possibility of
Captain Colendorp's refusal to see things in our light?' Elmur was
asking, after an interval filled in by the noises of wind and water
which could not be shut out of the Castle on such a night.

The Count looked up and scowled.

'Leave the management of the affair to me,' he said. 'Unless I were sure
of my man, I should not be such a fool as to bring him here to listen to
what I shall say to him to-night;' then he added as an afterthought,
'When once we have begun, Baron von Elmur, there can be no going back.
Remember that! The game must now be played to the end, whatever that end
is.'

Elmur pondered. Sagan was a bad tool, at once stubborn and secretive,
cunning enough to recognise and to resent handling, thickheaded and vain
enough to blunder ruinously. And Elmur found at the last and most
important moment that for s