ations, it is true, but always
with an apprehensive look at that long line of sleeping houses, whose
shutters--with a hole in the centre of each--seemed to stare down upon
the sand. No smoke, no flames, no sign of human occupance was there:
the sea-gull and the pigeon pecked together upon the door-steps or the
window-sills, or perched upon the ridges of the high-pitched roofs, and
a heron stalked at the outlet of a gutter that ran down the street. The
sea, quiet and dull, the east turned from crimson to grey; the mountains
streaming with mist----

"Cammercy after all!" said Count Victor to himself; "I shall wake in a
moment, but yet for a nightmare 'tis the most extraordinary I have ever
experienced."

"I hope you are a good Christian," said the Chamberlain, ready first and
waiting, bending his borrowed weapon in malignant arcs above his head.

"Three-fourths of one at least," said Montaiglon; "for I try my best to
be a decent man," and he daintily and deliberately turned up his sleeve
upon an arm as white as milk.

"I'm waiting," said the Chamberlain.

"So! _en garde!_" said his antagonist, throwing off his hat and putting
up his weapon.

There was a tinkle of steel like the sound of ice afloat in a glass.

The town but seemed to sleep wholly; as it happened, there was one awake
in it who had, of all its inhabitants, the most vital interest in this
stern business out upon the sands. She had gone home from the ball rent
with vexation and disappointment; her husband snored, a mannikin of
parchment, jaundice-cheeked, scorched at the nose with snuff; and,
shuddering with distaste of her cage and her companion, she sat long
at the window, all her finery on, chasing dream with dream, and every
dream, as she knew, alas! with the inevitable poignancy of waking to the
truth. For her the flaming east was hell's own vestibule, for her the
greying dawn was a pallor of the heart, the death of hope. She sat
turning and turning the marriage-ring upon her finger, sometimes all
unconsciously essaying to slip it off, and tugging viciously at the
knuckle-joint that prevented its removal, and her eyes, heavy for sleep
and moist with sorrow, still could pierce the woods of Shira Glen
to their deep-most recesses and see her lover there. They roamed so
eagerly, so hungrily into that far distance, that for a while she failed
to see the figures on the nearer sand. They swam into her recognition
like wraiths upsprung, as it were, from t