ng of the gold while the
great gale was blowing.

"James de la Molle."

Thus on a long gone Christmas Day, in the hour of a great wind, was
the gold hid, and now on this Christmas Day, when another great wind
raged overhead, it was found again, in time to save a daughter of the
house of de la Molle from a fate sore as death.

CHAPTER XLII

IDA GOES TO MEET HER FATE

Most people of a certain age and a certain degree of sensitiveness, in
looking back down the vista of their lives, whereon memory's
melancholy light plays in fitful flashes like the alternate glow of a
censer swung in the twilight of a tomb, can recall some one night of
peculiar mental agony. It may have come when first we found ourselves
face to face with the chill and hopeless horror of departed life;
when, in our soul's despair, we stretched out vain hands and wept,
called and no answer came; when we kissed those beloved lips and
shrunk aghast at contact with their clay, those lips more eloquent now
in the rich pomp of their unutterable silence than in the brightest
hour of their unsealing. It may have come when our honour and the hope
of all our days lay at our feet shattered like a sherd on the world's
hard road. It may have come when she, the star of our youth, the type
of completed beauty and woman's most perfect measure, she who held the
chalice of our hope, ruthlessly emptied and crushed it, and, as became
a star, passed down our horizon's ways to rise upon some other sky. It
may have come when Brutus stabbed us, or when a child whom we had
cherished struck us with a serpent-fang of treachery and left the
poison to creep upon our heart. One way or another it has been with
most of us, that long night of utter woe, and all will own that it is
a ghastly thing to face.

And so Ida de la Molle had found it. The shriek of the great gale
rushing on that Christmas Eve round the stout Norman towers was not
more strong than the breath of the despair which shook her life. She
could not sleep--who could sleep on such a night, the herald of such a
morrow? The wail and roar of the wind, the crash of falling trees, and
the rattle of flying stones seemed to form a fit accompaniment to the
turmoil of her mind.

She rose, went to the window, and in the dim light watched the trees
gigantically tossing in struggle for their life. An oak and a birch
were wi