Here he had waited for her, unconscious of danger, with a smile on his lips and the love-light in his eyes, perchance in his folly humming the air of a ballad, as he had yesternight. Then through the trees treachery had stolen upon him, and where he had looked to see love, death himself had stalked grimly on the scene. She shuddered, covering her face with her hands, as if to shut out the sight of some terrible phantom. Yet for all that her restless brain conjured up before her unwilling eyes fresh scenes of terror; her father, stern, implacable, revengeful, as he remembered the fair-haired boy so cruelly done to death in that far-off wood of St Aubin, and beside him the true perpetrator of the deed, smiling, triumphant, full of cruel and evil suggestions and words, with the cunning, vacant face of Pierre the fool, gleeful at the part he had been doubtless paid to play, at his elbow; whilst the background was filled up with grim, curious faces, pitiless, for the most part, save where Job and Marie Alloadec stood fearful, and perchance weeping, yet not for his sake, but for hers. Alas! not one there to pity _him_, to look kindly on _him_; he was alone, surrounded by cruel enemies, with death standing in the shadows beside him—death, in all its hideous garb, without even the golden glamour of glory to hide its mocking features. A resolve to hasten back to the château and to stand beside the man she loved overcame the sense of faintness which at first threatened her, but even as she rose, with that aching pain of sorrow, too deep for tears, at her heart, a cold touch on her hand sent the blood throbbing back with a sudden frenzy of fear. The memory of the unrepentant friar who so grimly strolled around the earthly scene of his sins came vividly before her, and as she bent her eyes she fully expected to see them rest upon the shadowy cowl of the chapel’s ghostly inhabitant. Instead it was the lean, grey form of the wolf-hound Gloire on which her eyes fell, meeting the beast’s dumb, affectionate gaze with the thrill which sympathy in distress ever brings, even if that sympathy is but a dog’s—perchance at times a truer and more helpful one than his human master’s. "Gloire," she whispered, bending down with a sudden impulse to kiss the shaggy, faithful head. "Ah, Gloire, how camest thou hither? Was it because thou knewest—wise beast!—that thy mistress was in sore need of a comforter, and alone in this terrible place, with a heart which, I fear me, must break ere dawn?"