ls--the
dirk, went to their places, and last he put his hand upon the hilt of a
sword--not a claymore, but the weapon he had worn in the foreign field.
As foolish a piece of masquerade as ever a child had found entertainment
in, and yet, if one could see it, with some great element of pathos and
of dignity. For with every item of the discarded and degraded costume
of his race he seemed to put on a grace not there before, a manliness,
a spirit that had lain in abeyance with the clothes in that mothy chest.
It was no done man who eagerly trod the floor of that ruined chapel, no
lack-lustre failure of life, but one complete, commingling action with
his sentiment. He felt the world spacious about him again; a summons to
ample fields beyond the rotting woods and the sonorous shore of Doom.
The blood of his folk, that had somehow seemed to stay about his heart
in indolent clots, began to course to every extremity, and gave his
brain a tingling clarity, a wholesome intoxication of the perfect man.

He drew the sword from its scabbard, joying hugely in the lisp of the
steel, at its gleam in the candle-light, and he felt anew the wonder of
one who had drunk the wine of life and venture to its lees.

He made with the weapon an airy academic salute _a la Gerard_ and the
new school of fence, thrust swift in tierce like a sun-flash in forest
after rain, followed with a parade, and felt an expert's ecstasy. The
blood tingled to his veins; his eyes grew large and flashing; a flush
came to that cheek, for ordinary so wan. Over and over again he sheathed
the sword, and as often withdrew it from its scabbard. Then he handled
the dirk with the pleasure of a child. But always back to the sword,
handled with beauty and aplomb, always back to the sword, and he had it
before him, a beam of fatal light, when something startled him, as one
struck unexpectedly by a whip.

There was a furious rapping at the outer door!

CHAPTER XVIII -- "Loch Sloy!"

The rap that startled Doom in the midst of his masquerade in the chapel
of his house, came like the morning beat of drums to his guest a storey
lower. Count Victor sprang up with a certainty that trouble brew,
dressed with all speed, and yet with the coolness of one who has
heard alarums on menaced frontiers; took his sword in hand, hesitated,
remembered Olivia, and laid it down again; then descended the dark stair
that seemed the very pit of hazards.

A perturbing silence had succeeded t