he drew a deep breath of relief. A step that might have been the
step of a sentry pacing the rampart, and now pausing, now moving on,
began to approach him. It came on, paused, came on, paused--this time
close at hand. Two or three dull sounds followed, then the sharper noise
of a falling stone. Immediately the foot of the sentry, if sentry it
was, began to retreat.

Claude drove his nails into the palms of his hands and waited, waited
through an eternity, waited until the retreating foot had almost
reached, as he judged, the Porte Tertasse. Then he stole out, groped his
way to the wall, and passed his hand along the outer side until he came
to the nail. He found it. It had been made secure, and from it depended
a thin string.

He set to work at once to draw up the string. There was a small weight
attached to it, which rose slowly until it reached his hand. It was a
stone about as large as the fist, and of a whitish colour.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN TWO CHARACTERS.

After the wave, the trough of the wave; after action, passion. Not to
sink a little after rising to the pitch of self-sacrifice, not to shed,
when the deed is done, some bitter tears of regret and self-pity, were
to be cast in a mould above the human.

When the cloak--dear garment!--had slipped from her hands and the head
bent that its owner might raise the cloak had passed from sight--when
Anne had fled to the farther side of the room, to the farther side of
the settle, and had heard his step die away, she would have given the
world to see him again, to feel his arm about her, to hear the sound of
his voice. The tears streamed down her face; in vain she tried to stay
them with her hands, in vain she chid herself for her weakness. "It is
for him! for him!" she moaned, and hid her face in her hands. But words
stay no tears; and on the hearth which his coming had changed for her,
standing where she had first seen him, where she had heard his first
words of love, where she had tried him, she wept bitter tears for him.

The storm died away at last--for after every storm falls a calm--but it
left the empty house, the empty heart, silence. Her mother? She had
still her mother, and with lagging footsteps she went upstairs to her.
But she found her in a deep sleep, and she descended again, and going to
his room began to put together his few belongings, the clothes he had
worn, the books he had read; that if the house were entered they might
not be lost to