senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion;
that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,--and that
the jewel itself, the Soul of the Poet, had by a superhuman access
of will, managed to break its bonds and escape elsewhere. But
whither? ... Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear
shadow? ... This was a question to which the mystic monk, gifted
as he was with a powerful spiritual insight into "things unseen
and eternal," could find no satisfactory answer, and in his
anxious perplexity he betook himself to the chapel, and there, by
the red glimmer of the crimson star that shone dimly above the
altar, he knelt alone and prayed in silence till the heavy night
had passed, and the storm had slain itself with the sword of its
own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.




CHAPTER IV.

"ANGELUS DOMINE."


The next morning dawned pallidly over a sea of gray mist--not a
glimpse of the landscape was visible--nothing but a shadowy
vastness of floating vapor that moved slowly fold upon fold, wave
upon wave, as though bent on blotting out the world. A very faint,
chill light peered through the narrow arched window of the room
where Alwyn lay, still wrapped in that profound repose, so like
the last long sleep from which some of our modern scientists tell
us there can be no awakening. His condition was unchanged,--the