For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters or his incidents should be trite, common, or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things which may possibly never have fallen within the knowledge of great part of his readers. HENRY FIELDING. CONTENTS PART I The Sea Like Bronze PART II The Dance Round the Town PART III Sea-fog PART IV The Tower PART I: THE SEA LIKE BRONZE. . . . I You're my friend: I was the man the Duke spoke to: I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too: So here's the tale from beginning to end, My friend! * * * Ours is a great wild country; If you climb to our castle's top, I don't see where your eye can stop; For when you've passed the cornfield country, Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed, And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract, And cattle-tract to open-chase, And open-chase to the very base Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace, Round about, solemn and slow, One by one, row after row, Up and up the pine trees go, Go, like black priests up, and so Down the other side again To another greater, wilder country. . . . 'To another greater, wilder country . . . 'To another greater . . .' The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away. The Browning lines--old-fashioned surely?--had yielded it a moment's hope. Those and some other lines from another outmoded book: "But the place reasserted its spell, marshalling once again its army, its silver-belted knights, its castles of perilous frowning darkness, its meadows of gold and silver streams. "The old spell working the same purpose. For how many times and for what intent? That we may be reminded yet once again that there is the step behind the door, the light beyond the window, the rustle on the stair, and that it is for these things only that we must watch and wait?" For Harkness had committed the folly of having two books open on his knee--a peek at one, a peek at another, a long, eager glance through the window at the summer scene, but above all a sensuous state of slumber hovering in the hot scented afternoon air just above him, waiting to pounce . . . to pounce . . .