The Seven Houses a Romance

me to time he leant forward, warming himself: since, in spite of its dregs of passions, the blood of old age is chilly. At the fall of the dusk and in the dimly-lit, cavernous hall of Chateau Lhoeac, grey and gloomy even in the full of a summer's moon, the dusk fell swiftly the wenches had brought lights; but the Seigneur had harshly bidden them begone; speaking with less than even his scant courtesy, and then turned back and stared afresh at the red embers. Five times in his three hours' vigil he had leaped to his feet in a quick impulse of impatience and paced the broad hall up and down with a tread whose firmness told little of his five-and-seventy years of hard-lived life. Up and down, up and down, his shortened scabbard battering against his left heel as he walked. Each time he crossed the foot of the stairway that opened at the back of the hall he paused, listening. A second or two, no more, he stood with lifted chin and one hand hollowed to help the dullness of hearing, then, as no sound came down the stair-shaft but the common, far-off babble of a great household, his pointed beard sank down upon his breast again, and he went on his restless way; a living shadow amid a hundred wavering silhouettes that leaped, and danced, and postured in the play of the fire. Then his mood would change afresh, or his mind grow weaiy of the monotonous, solitary tramp. Back he went to his settle, and sighing wearily bent once more over the blaze warming himself, while above him on the groined roof his distorted outline loomed black and vast as King Solomon's imprisoned Geni of the Smoke.