Produced by Al Haines. [Illustration: Cover] [Illustration: "FLAVIAN OF GAMBREVAULT STOOD BOUND BEFORE HER."] LOVE AMONG THE RUINS BY WARWICK DEEPING AUTHOR OF "UTHER AND IGRAINE" Grim work, sirs; what would you! War is the devil. _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. BENDA_ New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1904 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1904. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER WITH ALL LOVE AND GRATITUDE PART I I The branches of the forest invoked the sky with the supplications of their thousand hands. Black, tumultuous, terrible, the wilds billowed under the moon, stifled with the night, silent as a windless sea. Winter, like a pale Semiramis of gigantic mould, stood with her coronet touching the steely sky. A mighty company of stars stared frost-bright from the heavens. A pillar of fire shone red amid the chaos of the woods. Like a great torch, a blazing tower hurled spears of light into the gloom. Shadows, vast and fantastic, struggled like Titans striving with Destiny in the silence of the night. Their substanceless limbs leapt and writhed through the gnarled alleys of the forest. Overhead, the moon looked down with thin and silver lethargy on the havoc kindled by the hand of man. In a glade, all golden with the breath of the fire, blackened battlements waved a pennon of vermilion flame above the woods. Smoke, in eddying and gilded clouds, rolled heavenwards to be silvered into snow by the light of the moon. The grass of the glade shone a dusky, yet brilliant green; the tower’s windows were red as rubies on a pall of sables. About its base, cottages were burning like faggots piled about a martyr’s loins.