It was soon after eight o'clock, and darkness had not long covered
the land and sent the workers home. There was no moon. Indeed, the
summons to the gate, coming so soon after nightfall, seemed to
suggest the arrival of a traveller, who had not deemed it expedient
to pass through the winding streets of Gemosac by daylight.

The castle lies on a height, sufficiently removed from the little
town to temper the stir of its streets to a pleasant and unobtrusive
evidence of neighbourhood. Had the traveller come in a carriage,
the sound of its wheels would certainly have been heard; and nearer
at hand, the tramp of horses on the hollow of the old drawbridge,
not raised these hundred years, must have heralded the summons of
the bell. But none of these sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac,
who sat alone in the little white room upstairs, nor Marie and her
husband, dumb and worn by the day's toil, who awaited bedtime on a
stone seat by the stable door.

Juliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and
shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate.

"It is some one who comes on foot," she heard Marie say. "Some
beggar--the roads are full of them. See that he gets no farther
than the gate."

She heard Jean draw back the bolts and answer gruffly, in a few
words, through the interstice of a grudging door, what seemed to be
inquiries made in a voice that was not the voice of a peasant.
Marie rose and went to the gate. In a few minutes they returned,
and Juliette drew back from the window, for they were accompanied by