Taking up one of these, I went to my bedroom, pausing at the head of the black staircase to listen as one instinctively does in a great silence.

The household was asleep.

A faint patter broke the stillness; Lucille's dog--a small white shadow in the gloom--came towards me from her bedroom, outside of which he slept.

He looked up at me with a restrained jerk of the tail, for we were always friends, and his expression said: "Anything wrong ?" He glanced back over his shoulder to Lucille's door, as if to intimate that his own charge was, at all events, safe; then he passed me, and pressed his inquiring nose to the threshold of the Vicomte's study door.

He was a singular little dog, with a deep sense of responsibility, which he only laid aside in Lucille's presence.