He was still dazed from the strain of watching, from the gloom of the black tower stairs and of the long unlit passages when he reached the basement rooms that were Master Simon’s province at Bindon. Pushing open the heavy oaken door, he stood a moment looking in. There was cheerful candle-gleam where he was wont to find dimness; a gay sound of laughter and words where silence used to reign; and instead of Master Simon’s bent grey head, there rose before his sight, haloed with light, so white and pure as almost to seem luminous itself, a young forehead set in a radiance of crisp, fiery-gold hair. His eyes encountered the beam of two unknown eyes, exquisitely blue. Blue as his star! And he thought he still saw visions; thought that his star had as suddenly and sweetly taken living shape here below as above in the unattainable skies. CHAPTER VI EYES, BLUE AS HIS STAR ——Dwelt on my heaven a face Most starry-fair, but kindled from within As ’twere with dawn! —TENNYSON (_The Lover’s Tale_). On the new-comer’s entrance Ellinor looked up. The smile was arrested on her lips and her eyes grew grave with wonder: there was something curiously unsubstantial, something almost fantastic in the man that stood thus, framed in the gaping darkness of the doorway. That pale head, refined to ætherealisation, with its masses of dense, black hair; that straight figure, unusually tall and seeming taller still by reason of its exceeding leanness, romantically draped in the folds of a sable-lined cloak; above all, those eyes, under penthouse brows, singularly light and luminous in spite of their deep-setting, gazing straight at her, through her and beyond her—the eyes of the dreamer, or rather of the seer! In her surprise she failed for the moment to connect with this apparition the forgotten identity of the “cousin David” she had known in her girl days; the smooth-cheeked lad—dandy, fox-hunter, poet, politician—but in every phase, image of assertive and satisfied youth. Master Simon broke the spell of the singular moment. “Ah, David,” quoth he, “dazed—moonstruck as usual? Awake, good dreamer, awake! There have been fine happenings here below while you were frittering God’s good time, blinking at your stars!” He rose from his seat and shuffled round the table with quite unusual alertness. A glass of the vintage served to him by his daughter had brought a transient fire into the sluggish veins. As he tapped David on the arm, the latter turned his abstracted gaze upon him with a new bewilderment: the bloodless simpler, with a pink glow upon his cheek, with skull-cap rakishly askew on his bald head, with a roguish gleam in his usually keenly-cold eye—unwonted spectacle!