entered; a woman was busy at the open window; he stared in amazement
and chagrin.

CHAPTER XII -- OMENS AND ALARMS

Beaten back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants
rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at
least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped
out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were
swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and
the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the
warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a
merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count
Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held
no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound
silence on the shore and all along the coast--a silence the more
sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle,
his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain
falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and
trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for
that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade
faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads;
it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in
affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it
suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor scrutinised the ground
beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a
single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something
too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the
country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where
Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the
alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the
south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its
chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the
shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more
sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his
feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead.

He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere
else the desolation was pitiful--the hips glowing crimson on their
stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green
with da