old, such as might have flashed
from the armor of some celestial host marshalled and marching against the
Powers of Darkness. To the left, under lowered eyelids of sable clouds,
there ran a band of red fire that seemed as if it must belt the earth
with its fury, a red fire that might have flamed from the mouth of the
very pit. Lagardere was not over-imaginative, but the strangeness of the
contrast, the fierce splendor of the warring colors, touched the player's
heart beneath the soldier's hide. "The gold of heaven," he murmured, and
saluted the sky to the right. "The rod of hell," he thought, and pointed
towards the left, where distant trees stared, black, angry outlines
against those waves of livid fire. Was not this contest in the clouds a
kind of allegory of the quarrel in which he was now engaged, and was not
his cause very surely, in its righteousness, its justice, its honor,
gilded and invigorated by those noble rays to strive against and
overthrow the legionaries of evil?

Even as he thought such unfamiliar thoughts, the pageant of opposing
forces dimmed and dwindled. The darkness was gathering swiftly, investing
the world with its legion of gloom; and in the shadow of the great Castle
of Caylus, rising like a rock itself out of the solid rock behind
Lagardere, the moat was soon very dark indeed. There was little light in
the moonless sky; there came none from the castle, which in its dim
outline of towers and battlements might have been the enchanted palace of
some fairy tale, so soundless, so lightless, so unpeopled did it seem.
There was a faint gleam discernible in the windows of the Inn on the
other side of the gorge from which he had just succeeded in escaping.

Lagardere looked up at the Inn and laughed; Lagardere looked up at the
castle and smiled. What was she like, he wondered, that beautiful
Gabrielle de Caylus, whom it had been his impudent ambition to woo, and
whom he now knew to be married to Nevers, his appointed antagonist? He
had come all that way with the pleasant intention of killing Nevers, but
he felt more friendly towards his enemy since he had learned of the plot
against his life, and he wondered who was the instigator of that plot,
who was the paymaster of the, as he believed, baffled assassins. For in a
sense he believed them to be baffled, and this for two reasons. The first
was that he heard no sound of stealthy footsteps creeping across the
bridge. The second was that when he glanced u