r--at his age."

CHAPTER XXXIII -- BACK IN DOOM

The night brooded on the Highlands when Count Victor reached the
shore. Snow and darkness clotted in the clefts of the valleys opening
innumerably on the sea, but the hills held up their heads and thought
among the stars--unbending and august and pure, knowing nothing at all
of the glens and shadows. It was like a convocation of spirits. The
peaks rose everywhere white to the brows and vastly ruminating. An
ebbing tide too, so that the strand was bare. Upon the sands where there
had been that folly of the morning the waves rolled in an ascending
lisp, spilled upon at times with gold when the decaying moon--a
halbert-head thrown angrily among Ossian's flying ghosts, the warrior
clouds--cut through them sometimes and was so reflected in the sea. The
sea was good; good to hear and smell; the flying clouds were grateful to
the eye; the stars--he praised God for the delicious stars not in words
but in an exultation of gratitude and affection, yet the mountain-peaks
were most of all his comforters.

He had run from the castle as if the devil had been at his red heels,
with that ridiculous coat flapping its heavily braided skirts about
his calves; passed through snow-smothered gardens, bordered boding
dark plantations of firs, leaped opposing fell-dykes whence sheltering
animals ran terrified at the apparition, and he came out upon the
seaside at the bay as one who has overcome a nightmare and wakens to see
the familiar friendly glimmer of the bedroom fire.

A miracle! and mainly worked by a glimpse of these blanched hills. For
he knew now they were an inseparable part of his memory of Olivia, _her_
hills, _her_ sheltering sentinels, the mere sight of them Doom's orison.
Though he had thought of her so much when he shivered in the fosse, it
had too often been as something unattainable, never to be seen again
perhaps, a part of his life past and done with. An incubus rode his
chest, though he never knew till now, when it fled at the sight of
Olivia's constant friends the mountains. Why, the girl lived! her home
was round the corner there dark-jutting in the sea! He could, with some
activity, be rapping at her father's door in a couple of hours!

"_Grace de Dieu!_" said he, "let us leave trifles and go home."

It was a curious sign of his preoccupation, ever since he had escaped
from his imprisonment, that he should not once have thought on where
he was to fly to till