Messer Hugolin's office. Through a chink struggled
a feeble beam of pale, yellow light, but his uncle was poring,
doubtless, over his ledgers and had heard no sound. The wolf-hound Grip
wagged his tail as Constans passed, and he patted his head, the one
single creature in his uncle's household who might regret his absence on
the morrow. Now the way was clear; he stole off into the darkness,
finding no difficulty in scaling the wall, and so was free.

The night was misty and starless and the tide on a strong ebb. The
voyage down-stream was without incident, and by midnight he had landed
within the city lines, but much farther up-town than upon the occasion
of his first adventure. His plan was to seek some uninhabited house
within convenient distance of the library building and make that his
temporary headquarters. He found what he wanted in the block immediately
to the westward of the library, and in three or four trips he had
transported thither his stock of food and other impedimenta. The boat
had leaked badly on the way down the river, and was plainly unseaworthy.
There was no place in which to hide the craft, and to allow her to
remain moored at the pier would be tantamount to announcing his arrival
to the first sharp-eyed Doomsman who might chance to pass that way. So,
pushing her out into the current with a vigorous shove from his foot,
Constans watched the little hull disappear in the darkness. Henceforth
he must depend entirely upon his own resources, inadequate as they were
for the task before him. But upon this phase of the situation he would
not allow himself to dwell. Such unprofitable meditation could breed
naught but irresolution and be unnerving to both body and mind; if he
were to play the coward now he but invited the fate he feared. Courage,
then, and forward!

XI

THE SISTERS

A young girl sat before a magnificent fireplace of cut stone gazing into
the fire of drift-wood that burned diffidently upon a hearth whose
spaciousness would have been more fittingly adorned by Vergil's "no
small part of a tree." Out-of-doors the snow was whirling down in small,
frozen flakes that the northwest gale ground into powder against the
granite walls and then sifted through every crack and crevice; not a
door-sill or window-seat but wore its decoration of a pure white wreath.
Bitterly cold it had grown with the closing in of the dusk, and the girl
drew her cloak, a superb garment of Russian sables, closer