“ ‘CHILDE ROLAND to the Dark Tower came!’ ” said Lionel West, and glancing at his companion laughed at the aptness of the quotation.
   Cleys Castle flung its swart shoulders back against a wet, saffron sky where tattered rags of cloud fluttered like banners above the Norman keep, and the waves of the moat, reflecting that evil light, fretted in yellow flood the downward plunging of the tremendous walls.
   Cleys stood heavy and uncompromising upon the mound which had held it for a thousand years; the drawbridge down, the portcullis lifted, waiting for a troop of cavalry; a king; a shrieking prisoner; or a Rolls-Royce car bringing the master and a friend home from town. Restored through the centuries by successive owners, the old pile had never lost its air of brooding majesty. It held its secrets well. Backed by the mountains of the Welsh border, the twin towers of the keep commanded a widening plain, in summer thinly wooded, but now desolate and haunted under the October wind by poor ghosts of thickets, lost and shiver­ing along the edges of the high road. It was impossible to imagine this grim giantess of a castle with her battlements and arrow-slits as a twentieth century home; a fortress, a prison, a fantasy out of the past, perhaps. . .  What was the meaning of her challenge?
   “Dark deeds have been done here,” said Lionel West, in what Harry called his “Old Bailey voice.”
   A ragged flight of rooks tore out of the yellow heaven and circled the massive walls; the black shadow seemed to creep closer into the shelter of the mountains; across the miles of the wild Welsh country went the soughing October wind. Nothing else stirred but the ancient water and the chains of the drawbridge.
   Harry Stacey laughed.
   “You always were romantic, West. So the place gives you the creeps? We’ll soon put that right with a drink and a few gramophone records. All twentieth century comforts when we get beyond the keep.”
   The Rolls plunged over the drawbridge and entered the frowning gates of antiquity. Both men were silent.
   Lionel West, K.C., tired of the South, tired of the East, sated with sunshine, bored and neuralgic and over-strung, longing for the work he was strictly forbidden to do, had prowled day after day in the wet streets of London and spent muggy evenings with a book over his bachelor fire. His friends, lucky fellows, were all busy. It maddened him to hear them talk about their work. He followed their cases in the papers, forecasted their line of defence, prepared appro­priate speeches, bit on his pipe and cursed when they went astray.
   It was October, a depressing month. After Christmas he would drag himself to Cannes, but meanwhile – what?
   He went out in search of tobacco, and in the shop met Harry Stacey.
   Such things do happen. Harry! With whom he had rolled, a muddied oaf on the Rugger field, who had lived on his staircase at Oriel, and littered his rooms, and shared his last fiver, and whom he had lost for sixteen years.
   The recognition was mutual.
   “Stacey?” Rather hesitant, uncertain.
   “West? . . . West!”
  “My good fellow, what are you doing here?”