hope on their threshold, and again when he replied to the formal
questions put to him by the governor. His voice was calm, and when they
gave him they prison register he signed it with a steady hand. At once a
gaoler, taking his orders from the governor, bade him follow: after
traversing various corridors, cold and damp, where the daylight might
sometimes enter but fresh air never, he opened a door, and Sainte-Croix
had no sooner entered than he heard it locked behind him.

At the grating of the lock he turned. The gaoler had left him with no
light but the rays of the moon, which, shining through a barred window
some eight or ten feet from the ground, shed a gleam upon a miserable
truckle-bed and left the rest of the room in deep obscurity. The
prisoner stood still for a moment and listened; then, when he had heard
the steps die away in the distance and knew himself to be alone at last,
he fell upon the bed with a cry more like the roaring of a wild beast
than any human sound: he cursed his fellow-man who had snatched him from
his joyous life to plunge him into a dungeon; he cursed his God who had
let this happen; he cried aloud to whatever powers might be that could
grant him revenge and liberty.

Just at that moment, as though summoned by these words from the bowels of
the earth, a man slowly stepped into the circle of blue light that fell
from the window-a man thin and pale, a man with long hair, in a black
doublet, who approached the foot of the bed where Sainte-Croix lay.
Brave as he was, this apparition so fully answered to his prayers (and at
the period the power of incantation and magic was still believed in) that
he felt no doubt that the arch-enemy of the human race, who is
continually at hand, had heard him and had now come in answer to his
prayers. He sat up on the bed, feeling mechanically at the place where
the handle of his sword would have been but two hours since, feeling his