nce
gave quickness to the execution.

But more haunting than all was one simple strain and brief, indeed never
wholly accomplished, as if the player sought to recollect a song forgot,
that was repeated over and over again, as though it were the motive
of the others or refrain. Sometimes Montaiglon thought the player had
despaired of concluding this bewitching melody when he changed suddenly
to another, and he had a very sorrow at his loss; again, when its
progress to him was checked by a veering current of the wind and the
flageolet rose once more with a different tune upon it, he dreaded that
the conclusion had been found in the lacuna.

He rose at last and went to the window, and tried in the wan
illumination of the heavens to detect the mysterious musician in the
garden, but that was quite impossible: too dark the night, too huge and
profound the shadows over Doom. He went to his door and opened it and
looked down the yawning stairway; only the sigh of the wind in the
gun-slits occupied the stairway, and the dark was the dark of Genesis.
And so again to bed, to lie with his weariness for long forgotten. He
found that tantalising fragment return again and again, but fated never
to be complete. It seemed, he fancied, something like a symbol of a
life--with all the qualities there, the sweetness, the affection, the
passion, the divine despair, the longing, even the valours and the
faiths to make a great accomplishment, but yet lacking the round
accomplishment. And as he waited once again for its recurrence he fell
asleep.

CHAPTER VI -- MUNGO BOYD

It was difficult for Count Victor, when he went abroad in the morning,
to revive in memory the dreary and mysterious impressions of his
arrival; and the melody he had heard so often half-completed in the dark
waste and hollow of the night was completely gone from his recollection,
leaving him only the annoying sense of something on the tongue's-tip, as
we say, but as unattainable as if it had never been heard. As he walked
upon a little knoll that lay between the seaside of the castle and the
wave itself, he found an air of the utmost benignity charged with the
odours of wet autumn woodlands in a sunshine. And the sea stretched
serene; the mists that had gathered in the night about the hills were
rising like the smoke of calm hearths into a sky without a cloud. The
castle itself, for all its natural arrogance and menace, had something
pleasant in its aspect looked