And with the words he moved toward the window, and, throwing it open, stepped out upon the spacious balcony. Here he learned speedily, from the conversation of the passing crowd, that, although dreadfully shocked and startled by the first intimation of the death he was to undergo, which he received from the sight of the fatal wheel, the lord of Kerguelen had died as becomes a proud, brave man, reconciled to the church, forgiving his enemies, without a groan or a murmur, under the protracted agonies of that most horrible of deaths, the breaking on the wheel! Meanwhile the day passed onward; and when evening came, and the last and most social meal of the day was laid on the domestic board, young Raoul had returned from his visit to the lady of his love, full of high hopes and happy anticipations. Afterward, according to his promise, the count de St. Renan went forth and held debate until a late hour of the night with the sieur d’Argenson. Raoul had not retired when he came home, too restless in his youthful ardor even to think of sleep. His father brought good tidings: the father of the lady had consented, and on their arrival in Bretagne the marriage-contract was to be signed in form. That was to Raoul an eventful day; and never did he forget it, or the teachings he drew from it. That day was his fate. PART II. The castle of St. Renan, like the dwellings of many of the nobles of Bretagne and Gascony, was a superb old pile of solid masonry towering above the huge cliffs which guard the whole of that iron coast with its gigantic masses of rude masonry. So close did it stand to the verge of these precipitous crags on its seaward face, that whenever the wind from the westward blew angrily and in earnest, the spray of the tremendous billows which rolled in from the wide Atlantic, and burst in thunder at the foot of those stern ramparts, was dashed so high by the collision that it would often fall in salt, bitter rain, upon the esplanade above, and dim the diamond-paned casements with its cold mists. For leagues on either side, as the spectator stood upon the terrace above and gazed out on the expanse of the everlasting ocean, nothing was to be seen but the salient angles or deep recesses formed by the dark, gray cliffs, unrelieved by any spot of verdure, or even by that line of silver sand at their base, which often intervenes between the rocks of an iron coast and the sea. Here, however, there was no such intermediate step visible; the black face of the rocks sunk sheer and abrupt into the water, which, by its dark-green hue, indicated to the practised eye, that it was deep and scarcely fathomable to the very shore.