age at his feet, his fingers pressed against the door. Some of
the words he could not decipher nor comprehend, but the first was plain
to his understanding.

"Doom!" said he airily and half aloud. "Doom! _Quelle felicite!_ It is
an omen."

Then he rapped lightly on the oak with the pommel of his sword.

CHAPTER III -- BARON OF DOOM

Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in
the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.

Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered
front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at
a single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other
evidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom.

"M. Bethune's bowl," he said to himself, "is not likely to be brimming
over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much
of the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry
again for a louis!--Glengarry _sans feu ni lieu_, but always the most
punctilious when most nearly penniless."

Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; then
reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously bare
the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, and
sheathed the steel.

A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently
just inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain
clanked. But something informed the Count Victor that he was being
observed, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss
was missing about the height of his head and that through the hole an
eye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with
a hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eye
apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count
Victor saw its owner fully revealed.

A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well
as humour. A domestic--a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count
Victor could not resist smiling back to it.

And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold,
with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or
thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at
the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He
put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a
mili