But I hardly needed even that protection to screen me from these truants. I might have stood visible in the lawn's centre, and yet been asked no question. For such as braved the frost came not out to spy for strangers; their eyes sought each other with too intimate an insistance. I had indeed timed my visit ill. The revels of the village were being repeated in the Castle. The sharp contrast of my particular purpose forced its reality grimly upon me, and made this vigil one long agony. I had planned to tell Larke the true object of my coming during the hour or so we should have to wait, and to draw some solace from his companionship. Now, however, I was planted there alone with a message of death for my foe or for myself, and the glamour of life in my eyes, and it seemed to me that all the tedium of my journey had been held over for these hours of waiting. To cap my discomfort I found occasion to prove to myself that I was a most indisputable prig. I had often discoursed to Larke concerning the consolations to be drawn from the classics in moments of distress. Now I sought to practise the precept, and to that end lowered a bucket into the well of my memories. But alas! I hauled up naught but tags about Cerberus and Charon, and passages from the sixth book of Vergil. To tell the honest truth, I was dismally afraid. The very stars in the sky flashed sword-points at my breast, and the ice upon the hills glittered like breastplates of steel. Moreover, my hands were swollen and clumsy with the cold, and I dreaded lest I might lose the nervous flexibility of their muscles, and so the nice command of my sword. I stripped off my gloves which were freezing on my fingers, and thrust my hands inside my shirt to keep them warm against my skin. Somehow or another, however, the night wore through. The stars and the moon shifted across the mountains, the music began to falter into breaks, and the murmurs grew louder from the village. I heard sledges descend the road with a jingle of bells, first one, then another, then several in quick succession. Iron gates clanked on the far side of the Castle, the windows darkened, and finally a light sprang up in the lower of the chambers which I watched.