"It does not belong to me. I can do nothing with it. I am not
sure that it belongs to any one--which adds to the spectral, you
see--although I suppose there is somewhere a nameless heir. How
restless you are!" he said, gently. "Will you come out in the long
hall where the great window gives an unobstructed view of the thing,
and walk off this nervousness? The storm is lifting, I think; the moon
is going to overcome. One may see by the way the fire burns that the
temperature is mounting. Perhaps we shall have a snow-slide as we
walk."

Rhoda and Merivale were singing some of the songs they had learned
since they came into the hill country, Mrs. Montresor was nodding
behind her fan an accompaniment to Dr. Devens's remarks, Adele was
deep in her novel, and a flirtation and some portfolios of prints
occupied the rest. To refuse was only to attract attention; besides, I
should like to walk. I rose and went out with him into the hall that
shut off the wing from the great empty caravansary.

"'And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor,'"

I quoted as we walked; and despite the fire burning on either side, he
had brought me a fur for my shoulders.

"Yes," he said, "there comes the moon at last. Now you shall see the
black and white of it."

"Oh!" I cried, clasping my hands, as all the silvery lights and
immense shadows burst out in a terrible sort of radiance. "The world
began to be made here! Poets should be born here!"

"Instead of tavern-keepers," said he, "which brings me to my story. I
am forty-three years old. Of course I was younger twenty-three years
ago. That must have been not long before you came into the world
yourself. Do you insist upon thinking twenty years' difference in age
makes any disparity, except in the case of him who has lost just that
twenty years' sweetness out of his life?"

"I hardly see what that has to do with the story of the Mount of
Sorrow," I said, as we turned from the window to measure the length of
the hall again.

"I hope," said he, "that the suffrage reform, which is to admit women
to the ballot, will never let them sit on the judicial bench, for
mercy is foreign to the heart of a woman."

"Is it not a strange way of telling a story?" I exclaimed.

"Patience!" he laughed. "The story is so short it needs a little
preface. As I was saying then, when I was twenty years old or so, the
name of old Raynier, of the Mount of Sorrow, was a by-word of terror
through the regio