, and I have tasted it elsewhere, too. Give me my own
acres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeed
from the rise of the sun till bedtime--a short day and a happy. My
father used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point of
Strome where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in the
port down-by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood of
him. If he saw a light out there at sea--the lamp of a ship outbound--he
would stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As
for me, no ship-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star
coming up above the hill Ardno."

"To-morrow," said Montaiglon--"to-morrow is another day; that's my
consolation in every trial."

"At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that," admitted
Doom; "at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it."

Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that sometimes
swept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back and
back at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him,
he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plotting
something? And with whom? What was the secret of that wind-blown castle,
its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the
domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he
possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what
signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning
there, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrilling
moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway;
but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom
himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless of
reading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room for
some clue to what he found nowhere else.

A chamber plain to meanness--there seemed nothing here to help him to
a solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangey and
dusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a window
only sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentious
interior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dog-eared
documents of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a
downfallen house had come about.

Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.

"Ay!" he said, "that's the ashes of Doom, a