t lay under the skin shone through
with a suggestion of some repressed stimulus, as if a great passion had
forced it up. In his eyes an underglow, so to call it, smoldered with
fascinating vagueness.

Mlle. Olympe sat for a moment on his knee and stroked his long black
hair.

"You will stay with me to-night, father, dear," she presently murmured,
coaxingly; "you will not go out to-night."

"I must be gone a little while," he said, rising at once, "but just a
little while."

She clung close to him.

"Not this night, please," she urged, with a touching tremor in her
voice. "Oh! you remember this night a year ago you had that dreadful
adventure in the dark room. You must not go out; please, for my sake, do
not."

An expert observer could have seen while this was going on a strange,
half-worried, almost fiercely concentrated expression in the Judge's
eyes. It was as if he mightily wished to remain with his child, but
could not by any effort resist some powerful temptation tugging at him
and drawing him away.

He kissed her tenderly, pushed her gently from him and went out.

The girl cast herself upon a sofa and buried her face in her hands, as a
vision of that night one year before came up before her eyes.

Some strange masked men had brought her father home far in the night,
white as a ghost, helpless, speechless, apparently dead. They put him
down there in the room and vanished.

He had no wound, no bruise, no mark of any violence. But he recovered
very slowly, and he never told what had befallen him.

Mlle. Olympe knew of her father's frequent duels, and if he had been
brought in dead or badly off on account of pistol ball or rapier thrust
she would not have been surprised beyond measure, but this mysterious
performance of the masked men and the unaccountable condition of the
Judge were taken hold upon by her imagination and raised to the highest
power of romantic meaning.

A year had passed, and she might not have recalled the exact anniversary
but for the prattle of an old servant to the effect that she had seen
her master, the Judge, marching at the head of a company of masked men,
himself wearing an "invisible" mask and a queer black velvet cap.

Mlle. Olympe observed that her father was flushed as if with wine, and
his bearing was indicative of some subtile and indescribable excitement
within him. When he went away she felt that something startling was
going to happen soon.

CHAPTER IV.