“Aha!  Fritz, if you were requested to fetch that bone away from him, what would you say?”

“I should think it a mission requiring extraordinary delicacy and tact.”

Then we broke out into a hearty laugh, and Sperver, seated in his leathern easy chair, with his left arm thrown back over his head, one of his manly legs over a stool, and the other in front of a huge log, which was dripping at its end with the oozing sap, and darted volumes of light grey smoke to the roof.

I was still contemplating the dog, when, suddenly recollecting our broken conversation, I went on—­

“Now, Sperver, you have not told me everything.  When you left the mountain for the castle was it not on account of the death of Gertrude, your good, excellent wife?”

Gideon frowned, and a tear dimmed his eye; he drew himself up, and shaking out the ashes of his pipe upon his thumbnail, he said—­

“True, my wife is dead.  That drove me from the woods.  I could not look upon the valley of Roche Creuse without pain.  I turned my flight in this direction:  I hunt less in the woods, and I can see it all from higher up, and if by chance the pack tails off in that direction I let them go.  I turn back and try to think of something else.”

Sperver had grown taciturn.  With his head drooped upon his breast, his eyes fixed on the stone floor, he sat silent.  I felt sorry to have awoke these melancholy recollections in him.  Then, my thoughts once more returning to the Black Plague grovelling in the snow, I felt a shivering of horror.

How strange! just one word had sent us into a train of unhappy thoughts.  A whole world of remembrances was called up by a chance.

I know not how long this silence lasted, when a growl, deep, long, and terrible, like distant thunder, made us start.

We looked at the dog.  The half-gnawed bone was still between his forepaws, but with head raised high, ears cocked up, and flashing eye, he was listening intently—­listening to the silence as it were, and an angry quivering ran down the length of his back.

Sperver and I fixed on each other anxious eyes; yet there was not a sound, not a breath outside, for the wind had gone down; nothing could be heard but the deep protracted growl which came from deep down the chest of the noble hound.

Suddenly he sprang up and bounded impetuously against the wall with a hoarse, rough bark of fearful loudness.  The walls re-echoed just as if a clap of thunder had rattled the casements.

Lieverle, with his head low down, seemed to want to see through the granite, and his lips drawn back from his teeth discovered them to the very gums, displaying two close rows of fangs white as ivory.  Still he growled.  For a moment he would stop abruptly with his nose snuffing close to the wall, next the floor, with strong respirations; then he would rise again in a fresh rage, and with his forepaws seemed as if he would break through the granite.