wer perched upon a promontory.

Revealed against the brown hills and the sombre woods of the farther
coast, it was scarcely a wonder that his eye had failed at first to find
it. Here were no pomps of lord or baron; little luxuriance could prevail
behind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance about
those walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp, no
pleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying man's
oldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends and one crenelated bastion
or turret betraying its sinister relation to its age, its whole aspect
arrogant and unfriendly, essential of war. Caught suddenly by the
vision that swept the fretted curve of the coast, it seemed blackly
to perpetuate the spirit of the land, its silence, its solitude and
terrors.

These reflections darted through the mind of Count Victor as he sped,
monstrously uncomfortable with the burden of the bag that bobbed on his
back, not to speak of the indignity of the office. It was not the kind
of castle he had looked for, but a castle, in the narrow and squalid
meaning of a penniless refugee like Bethune, it doubtless was, the only
one apparent on the landscape, and therefore too obviously the one he
sought.

"Very well, God is good!" said Count Victor, who, to tell all and
leave no shred of misunderstanding, was in some regards the frankest of
pagans, and he must be jogging on for its security.

But as he hurried, the ten broken men who had been fascinated by his too
ostentatious fob and the extravagance of his embroidery, and inspired
furthermore by a natural detestation of any foreign _duine uasail_
apparently bound for the seat of MacCailen Mor, gathered boldness, and
soon he heard the thicket break again behind him.

He paused, turned sharply with the pistols in his hands. Instantly
the wood enveloped his phantom foes; a bracken or two nodded, a hazel
sapling swung back and forward more freely than the wind accounted for.
And at the same time there rose on the afternoon the wail of a wild fowl
high up on the hill, answered in a sharp and querulous too-responsive
note of the same character in the wood before.

The gentleman who had twice fought _a la barriere_ felt a nameless new
thrill, a shudder of the being, born of antique terrors generations
before his arms were quartered with those of Rochefoucauld and Modene.

It was becoming all too awkward, this affair. He broke into a more rapid
wa