time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and then
a thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bow
unaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo,
though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality. He
seemed to be the family's friend resenting, as far as politeness might,
some inconvenience to which it was being subjected without having the
power to prevent the same.

Before they had gained the rock, dusk was on the country, brought the
sooner for a frost-fog that had been falling all afternoon. It wrapped
the woods upon the shore, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doom
itself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a place
less hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peace
it seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drab
sky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving
little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen,
flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad
sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the shore side no light
illumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in what
he fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless in
the chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance on
which Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.

Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observation
of anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenest
interest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as it
reached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo had
left open.

What had been a crepe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. The
corridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was like
a wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a door
somewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment a
gleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately by
a hurried step coming down the stair.

At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, but
the masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.

"M. le Baron," he concluded, "and home before me by another route," and
he stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give passage. But
the darkness made identity impossible, and he waited the recognition
of himself. It ne