CONTENTS: THE HOROSCOPE THE HOUSE OF LIFE THE HOUSE OF KINSFOLK THE HOUSE OF MARRIAGE THE HOUSE OF DEATH THE HOUSE OF RELIGION THE HOUSE OF HONOUR THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES an excerpt from CHAPTER I: THE HOROSCOPE I. IN his padded settle by the gaping western hearth of the great hall sat Guy de Lhoeac, Seigneur of that name and Seventh Suzerain in direct succession. For all that it was no more than mid-September a birch log had hung flaming on the huge brass dogs since sunset, and from time to time he leant forward, warming himself: since, in spite of its dregs of passions, the blood of old age is chilly. At the fall of the dusk and in the dimly-lit, cavernous hall of Chateau Lhoeac, grey and gloomy even in the full of a summer's moon, the dusk fell swiftly the wenches had brought lights; but the Seigneur had harshly bidden them begone; speaking with less than even his scant courtesy, and then turned back and stared afresh at the red embers. Five times in his three hours' vigil he had leaped to his feet in a quick impulse of impatience and paced the broad hall up and down with a tread whose firmness told little of his five-and-seventy years of hard-lived life. Up and down, up and down, his shortened scabbard battering against his left heel as he walked. Each time he crossed the foot of the stairway that opened at the back of the hall he paused, listening. A second or two, no more, he stood with lifted chin and one hand hollowed to help the dullness of hearing, then, as no sound came down the stair-shaft but the common, far-off babble of a great household, his pointed beard sank down upon his breast again, and he went on his restless way; a living shadow amid a hundred wavering silhouettes that leaped, and danced, and postured in the play of the fire. Then his mood would change afresh, or his mind grow weaiy of the monotonous, solitary tramp. Back he went to his settle, and sighing wearily bent once more over the blaze warming himself, while above him on the groined roof his distorted outline loomed black and vast as King Solomon's imprisoned Geni of the Smoke.