s might moan or rage outside this rocky pile, might hiss
and shriek and tear its wings among the jagged ruins, bellow and
thunder in and out of opened vaults, but it might not rattle a window
of the modern castellan's quarters or shake a latch of his chamber
door.

There, for reasons understood then only by himself, had Sir Adrian
elected, about the "year seven" of this century and in the prime of
his age, to transplant his lares and penates.

The while, this Adrian Landale's ancestral home stood, in its placid
and double pride of ancient and settled wealth, only some few miles
away as the bee flies, in the midst of its noble park, slightly
retired from the coast-line; and from its upper casements could be
descried by day the little green patch of Scarthey and the jagged
outline of its ruins on the yellow or glimmering face of the great
bay, and by night the light of its turret. And there he was still
living, in some kind of happiness, in the "year fourteen," when, out
of the eternal store of events, began to shape themselves the latter
episodes of a life in which storm and peace followed each other as
abruptly as in the very atmosphere that he then breathed.

For some eight years he had nested on that rock with no other
companions but a dog, a very ancient housekeeper who cooked and washed
for "t' young mester" as she obstinately persisted in calling the man
whom she had once nursed upon her knee, and a singular sturdy foreign
man (Rene L'Apotre in the language of his own land, but known as Renny
Potter to the land of his adoption); which latter was more than
suspected of having escaped from the Liverpool Tower, at that time the
lawful place of custody of French war prisoners.

His own voluntary captivity, however, had nothing really dismal for
Adrian Landale. And the inhabited portions of Scarthey ruins had
certainly nothing prison-like about them, nothing even that recalled
the wilful contrition of a hermitage.

On the second floor of the tower (the first being allotted to the use,
official and private, of the small household), clear of the
surrounding walls and dismantled battlements, the rooms were laid out
much as they might have been up at Pulwick Priory itself, yonder
within the verdant grounds on the distant rise. His sleeping quarters
plainly, though by no means ascetically furnished, opened into a large
chamber, where the philosophic light-keeper spent the best part of his
days. Here were broad and deep