zling himself about the dulcet singer and
her share in the clandestine midnight meeting. When he had finished his
game with his host, and the latter had pleaded business in the burgh as
an excuse for his absence in the afternoon, Count Victor went round Doom
on every side trying to read its mystery. While it was a house whose
very mortar must be drenched with tradition, whose every window had
looked upon histories innumerable worth retelling, nothing was revealed
of the matter in hand.

Many rooms of it were obviously unoccupied, for in the domestic routine
of the Baron and of Mungo and the lady of song there were two storeys
utterly unoccupied, and even in the flats habited there were seemingly
chambers vacant, at least ever unopened and forlorn. Count Victor
realised, as he looked at the frowning and taciturn walls, that he
might be in Doom a twelvemonth and have no chance to learn from that
abstracted scholar, its owner, one-half of its interior economy.

From the ground he could get no clear view of the woman's window: that
he discovered early, for it was in the woman he sought the key to all
Doom's little mystery. He must, to command the window, climb to his own
chamber in the tower, and even then it was not a full front view he had,
but a foreshortened glance at the side of it and the signal, if any more
signalling there might be. He never entered that room without a glance
along the sun-lit walls; he never passed the mouth of that corridor on
the half landing where his candle had blown out without as curious a
scrutiny as good-breeding might permit. And nothing was disclosed.

Mungo pervaded the place--Mungo toiling in the outhouses at tasks the
most menial, feeding the half-dozen moulting poultry, digging potatoes
in the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairs
with backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; and
in the _salle_ the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholy
by rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking with
pensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon his
knee--that was Doom as Count Victor was permitted to know it.

He began at last to doubt his senses, and half believe that what he had
heard on the night of his arrival had been some chimera, a dream of a
wearied and imperilled man in unaccustomed surroundings.

Mungo saw him walk with poorly concealed curiosity about the outside of
the stronghold, and smi