here, Perrin! Nothing he
could do before, no wickedness, no cruelty, could make her leave off
caring! But we women, if our looks are held up to scorn--well!--that's
the worst of all. So who can tell what may happen! Come, I must make
her and give her a cup of tea. She told me she hadn't eaten or drank
all day."

CHAPTER VIII.

It was a wild wet night in March. Dominic Le Mierre had just
finished supper, and he sat by the fire in the kitchen of
Orvilliere; he was in a particularly good mood, owing to the
excellence of the tobacco he was smoking. As he puffed at his second
pipe he congratulated himself on his long acquaintance with
Frenchmen, who had no scruples in giving him whole packages of this
excellent tobacco; and no conditions attached except the fun of
helping to hide it in the caves below the Haunted House, till it
could be conveyed to Brittany!

Then he laughed aloud at the idea of the countryside about this very
Haunted House. He had added two or three ghost tales to those
current; and, though he believed firmly in every weird story of the
two parishes, he had not felt a single scruple in inventing others
to terrify people from the spot. His love of lawlessness and danger
was infinitely stronger than his inherited faith in the
supernatural. The Haunted House brought to his mind the festival of
_Les Brandons_, when the dreaded place had lost its horror for the
time being, owing to the safety that is supposed to lie in numbers.
He chuckled as he remembered what a fool he had made of Ellenor.
Bah! Once and for all he had done with her! Who cared to look at her
now, fright that she was! And how dared that pious idiot of a
fisherman throw him down before all the company! Ah! he would soon
teach him better manners! he would thrash him well next time they
met!

So he plotted and thought and smoked, and the night wind howled and
the rain beat against the windows. All at once, he got up, and from
the rack fastened across the beamed ceiling he took an old black
book, his friend and evil counsellor, the _Grand-Mele_ which had
been in his family for generations. It was a book of magic,
containing spells to be used on every conceivable occasion, and
Dominic Le Mierre was past-master in the black art. Turning over the
pages with knitted brows, he searched for a spell to be used against
Perrin Corbet. At last he found it.

"Ah, it is quite easy to draw blood, and it need be but a drop!" he
muttered, "scratc