“Fortune has been truly kind,” said Julie.

After dinner they went back to the great room where the fire still blazed and Suzanne, when she had cleared everything away, joined them.  She quietly took a chair next to the wall and went to work on some sewing that she had found in the lodge.  But John saw that she had installed herself as a sort of guardian of them both, and she meant to watch over them as her children.  Yet however often she might appear to him in her old grim guise he would always be able to see beneath it.

Now they talked but little.  John saw after a while that Julie was growing sleepy, and truly a slender girl who had been through so much in one day had a right to rest.  He caught Suzanne’s eye and nodded.  Rising, the Frenchwoman said in the tone of command which perhaps she had often used to Julie as a child: 

“It’s time we were off to bed, Mademoiselle.  The storm will make us both sleep all the better.”

“Good night, Mr. John,” said Julie.

“Good night.  Miss Julie.”

Once more the stern face of Suzanne softened under a smile, but she and her charge marched briskly away, and left John alone before the fire.  He had decided that he would not sleep upstairs, but would occupy the gunroom from which a window looked out upon the front of the house.  There he made himself a bed with blankets and pillows that he brought from above and lay down amid arms.

The gunroom was certainly well stocked.  It held repeating rifles and fowling-pieces, large and small, and revolvers.  One big breech-loader had the weight of an elephant rifle, and there were also swords, bayonets and weapons of ancient type.  But John looked longest at the big rifle.  He felt that if need be he could hold the lodge against almost anything except cannon.

“It’s the first time I ever had a whole armory to myself,” he said, looking around proudly at the noble array.

But he was quite sure that no one could come for days except Muller, and the mystery of the forester’s absence again troubled him, although not very long.  Another look at the driving snow, and, wrapping himself in his blankets, he fell asleep to the music of the storm.  John awoke once far in the night, and his sense of comfort, as he lay between the blankets on the sofa that he had dragged into the gunroom, was so great that he merely luxuriated there for a little while and listened to the roar of the storm, which he could yet hear, despite the thickness of the walls.  But he rose at last, and went to the window.

The thick snowy blast was still driving past, and his eyes could not penetrate it more than a dozen feet.  But he rejoiced.  Their castle was growing stronger and stronger all the time, as nature steadily built her fortifications higher and higher around it.  Mulier himself, carrying out his duties of huntsman, might have gone to some isolated point in the mountains, and would not be able to return for days.  He wished no harm to Muller, but he hoped the possibility would become a fact.