the tapestry had an uncanny look; especially one, a hunter, who might have passed for an assassin, just taking aim at his victim.  The smile on his startlingly red lips, in reality only a self-satisfied smirk, was fairly devilish in that light, and his ghastly face horribly life-like.  The lamp burned dimly in the damp heavy air, the wind sighed and moaned along the corridors, and strange, frightful sounds came from the deserted chambers close at hand.  The storm that had long been threatening had come at last, and large, heavy rain-drops were driven violently against the window-panes by gusts of wind that made them rattle loudly in their leaden frames.  Sometimes it seemed as if the whole sash would give way before the fiercer blasts, as though a giant had set his knee against it, and was striving to force an entrance.  Now and again, when the wind lulled for a moment while it gathered strength for a fresh assault, the horrid shriek of an owl would be heard above the dashing of the rain that was falling in torrents.

The master of this dismal mansion paid little attention to this lugubrious symphony, but Beelzebub was very uneasy, starting up at every sound, and peering into the shadowy corners of the room, as if he could see there something invisible to human eyes.  The baron took up a little book that was lying upon the table, glanced at the familiar arms stamped upon its tarnished cover, and opening it, began to read in a listless, absent way.  His eyes followed the smooth rhythm of Ronsard’s ardent love-songs and stately sonnets, but his thoughts were wandering far afield, and he soon threw the book from him with an impatient gesture, and began slowly unfastening his garments, with the air of a man who is not sleepy, but only goes to bed because he does not know what else to do with himself, and has perhaps a faint hope of forgetting his troubles in the embrace of Morpheus, most blessed of all the gods.  The sand runs so slowly in the hour-glass on a dark, stormy night, in a half-ruined castle, ten leagues away from any living soul.

The poor young baron, only surviving representative of an ancient and noble house, had much indeed to make him melancholy and despondent.  His ancestors had worked their own ruin, and that of their descendants, in various ways.  Some by gambling, some in the army, some by undue prodigality in living—­in order that they might shine at court—­so that each generation had left the estate more and more diminished.  The fiefs, the farms, the land surrounding the chateau itself, all had been sold, one after the other, and the last baron, after desperate efforts to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the family—­efforts which came too late, for it is useless to try to stop the leaks after the vessel has gone down—­had left his son nothing but this half-ruined chateau and the few acres of barren land immediately around it.  The unfortunate child had been born and brought up in poverty.  His mother had died young, broken-hearted