ight have
passed for the veritable call of the woods to an unsuspicious ear, but
Montaiglon knew it for a human signal. As if to prove it so, it was
followed by the grating of the outer door upon its hinge, and the sound
of a foot stumbling among stones.

He reflected that the tide was out in all probability, and at once the
notion followed that here were his searchers, the Macfarlanes, back in
force to revenge his impetuous injury to their comrades. But then--a
second thought almost as promptly told him in that case there should be
no door opened.

A sound of subdued voices came from the foot of the tower and died in
the garden behind or was swept elsewhere by the wind; then, through the
voice of the wave, the moan of the wind, and its whistle in vent and
cranny, came a strain of music--not the harsh uncultured pipe of Mungo
the servitor, but a more dulcet air of flute or flageolet. In those
dark savage surroundings it seemed a sound inhuman, something unreal,
something of remembrance in delirium or dream, charged for this Parisian
with a thousand recollections of fond times, gay times, passionate times
elsewhere. Doom throbbed to the waves, but the flageolet stirred in him
not so much surprise at this incongruous experience as a wave of emotion
where all his past of gaillard was crystalled in a second--many nights
of dance and song anew experienced in a mellow note or two; an old love
reincarnated in a phrase (and the woman in the dust); the evenings of
Provence lived again, and Louis's darling flute piping from the chateau
over the field and river; moons of harvest vocal with some peasant
cheer; in the south the nightingale searching to express his kinship
with the mind of man and the creatures of the copse, his rapture at the
star.

Somehow the elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its
magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in passionate
crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon--and yet it was too
short--the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains.
Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the
manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with
tears at his father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the
dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made
special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an
Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a da