D’Alquen had taken his seat at the long narrow table opposite. He was clearly watching them with hardly a pretence of doing otherwise; there was nothing furtive about those fierce, eager, reckless eyes. Zarka took out a cigar and lighted it.
“How long,” he asked his companion, as he lay back lazily puffing the smoke to the low ceiling, “may we expect the present unsettled weather to last?”
“Who knows?” the other answered. “Come back here this day week, then ask me again,”—he laughed—“and I may tell you for certain.”
After a few casual remarks Zarka rose. “I must be going,” he observed, “if I would be home by nightfall. Luckily my way is downhill. Good-day to you, friend.”
As the Count took up his gun, D’Alquen spoke for the first time. “Have you had sport, sir?”
“Very fair,” Zarka answered, with a particularly courteous bow. “In the forest.”
“You have not brought your bag with you!” D’Alquen remarked, and Zarka thought he understood the half sneer on his face.
“I shoot for sport, not for food,” he retorted. “Good-day.”
As he came out upon the wild road the autumn sun was already well on its downward course, and the mountain peaks had begun to grow indistinct in the gathering mist. Walking at a brisk pace, he soon reached the rocky spur which interposed between him and the great forest. Gaining the precipitous path that led round the chasm he followed it as familiar ground in its windings, its sudden falls and rises. At one point it ran for a few dozen paces across an open plateau where for a short space the wall of rocks was broken. As Zarka advanced across this, suddenly there rose from the great abyss a gigantic figure terrible in its size, awful in its weirdness, a very horror in its human image yet ghostly form, more terrible still in its spectral likeness to the man whom it confronted.
Zarka, startled by the suddenness of the apparition, stopped dead with an involuntary gesture, then laughed aloud, and his laugh was half that of self-derision, half of greeting; a laugh in crescendo, and it seemed as though the spectre joined in and flung back its loud ending.