Saltash laughed.  “Not on the ramparts—­emphatically.  I’ll have mercy on you to that extent.  Put it on the spirit-lamp in the music-room, and leave it!  You needn’t sit up, any of you.  I’ll put out the lights.”

“Very good, my lord.”

The man withdrew, and Saltash chose a cigar.  An odd grimace drew his features as he lighted it.  He had the look of a man who surveys his last card and knows himself a loser.  Though he went out of the room and up the great staircase to the music-room with his head up and complete indifference in his carriage, his eyelids were slightly drawn.  He did not look as if he had enjoyed the game.

A single red lamp lighted the music-room, and the long apartment looked dim and ghostly.  He stood for a moment as he entered it and looked round, then with a scarcely perceptible lift of the shoulders he passed straight through to the curtain that hung before the door leading to the turret.  The darkness of the place gaped before him, and he turned back with a muttered word and recrossed the room.  There were Persian rugs upon the floor, and his feet made no sound.  He went to the mantel-piece and, feeling along it, found a small electric torch.  The light of it flared before him as he returned.  The door yielded to his touch and swung shut behind him.  He passed into vault-like silence.

The stone steps gave back the sound of his tread as he mounted, with eerie, wandering echoes.  The grey walls glimmered with a ghostly desolation around him.  Halfway up, he stopped to flick the ash from his cigar, and laughed aloud.  But the echoes of his laughter sounded like voices crying in the darkness.  He went on more swiftly, like a phantom imprisoned and seeking escape.  The echoes met him and fell away behind him.  The loneliness was like a curse.  The very air felt dead.

He reached the top of the turret at last, and the heavy door that gave upon the ramparts.  With a sound that was almost a gasp, he pushed it open, and passed out into the open air.

A full moon was shining, and his acres lay below him—­a wonderful picture in black and silver.  He came to the first gap in the battlements, mounted the parapet, and stood there with a hand resting on each side.

The wash of the sea came murmurously through the September silence.  His restless eyes flashed hither and thither over the quiet scene, taking in every detail, lingering nowhere.  The pine trees stirred in the distance below him, seeming to whisper together, and an owl hooted with a weird persistence down by the lake.  It was like the calling of a human voice—­almost like a cry of distress.  Then it ceased, and the trees were still again.

The spell of the silence fell like the falling of a curtain.  The loneliness crept about his heart.

He took the cigar from his mouth and spoke, ironically, grimly.

“There is your kingdom, Charles Rex!” he said.

He turned with the words and leaped down upon the narrow walk between the battlements.  The owl began to call again, but the desolation remained.  He paced forward with his hands behind him, his head bent.  No one could see him here.  The garment of mockery could be flung aside.  He was like a prisoner tramping the stone walls from which he could never escape.