ent, but now he was too busy
with his speculation whether Doom should gleam on him or not to study
this phenomenon of the frosty winds. He made a bargain with himself: if
the isle was black, that must mean his future fortune; if a light was
there, however tiny, it was the star of happy omen, it was--it was--it
was several things he dared not let himself think upon for fear of
immediate disappointment.

For a minute he paused as if to gather his courage and then make a dash
round the point.

_Ventre Dieu!_ Blackness! His heart ached.

And then, as most men do in similar circumstances, he decided that the
test was a preposterous one. Why, faith! should he relinquish hope of
everything because--

What! the light was there. Like a fool he had misjudged the distance in
the darkness and had been searching for it in the wrong place. It was
so bright that it might be a star estrayed, a tiny star and venturesome,
gone from the keeping of the maternal moon and wandered into the wood
behind Doom to tangle in the hazel-boughs. A dear star! a very gem of
stars! a star more precious than all the others in that clustered sky,
because it was the light of Olivia's window. A plague on all the others
with their twinkling search among the clouds for the little one lost!
he wished it had been a darker night that he might have only this one
visible.

By rights he should be weary and cold, and the day's events should
trouble him; but to tell the truth, he was in a happy exaltation all the
rest of the way. Sometimes the star of hope evaded him as he followed
the bending path, trees interposing; he only ran the faster to get it
into his vision again, and it was his beacon up to the very walls of
Doom.

The castle took possession of the night.

How odd that he should have fancied that brave tower arrogant; it was
tranced in the very air of friendliness and love--the fairy residence,
the moated keep of all the sweet old tales his nurse was used to tell
him when he was a child in Cam-mercy.

And there he had a grateful memory of the ringleted middle-aged lady
who had alternately whipped and kissed him, and in his night's terrors
soothed him with tales. "My faith!" said he, "thou didst not think thy
Perrault's 'Contes des Fees' might, twenty years after, have so close an
application to a woman and a tower in misty Albion."

He walked deliberately across to the rock, went round the tower, stood
a moment in the draggled arbour--the poor a