he had paid his shilling for admission at the
wooden booth outside the Castle gate and had found himself herded with a
crowd of affectionately inclined young women and young men who perspired
freely--the latter for the sake of greater comfort had removed their
coats and knotted handkerchiefs about their throats. In good time a
decrepit ex-butler had appeared to act as guide and had led the
excursionists over the Norman part of the ruins. He had shown them the
dungeons, the room in which a prince had been murdered and the havoc
wrought upon the walls by Cromwellian cannon. The ever recurring theme
of his trembling narrative was the prowess and the splendor of the
Dawns. He was like a weak-voiced cricket chirping in the sunshine. His
stories of bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were
too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the
race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of
his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind
to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the
pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They
wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly
sheep looked up somnolently to watch them.

To the few who remained the old man mumbled on. It was the nobility of
the late Lord Dawn that he was now recounting--the daring horseman he
had been, the deviltry of him, the lust of life he had had, the
greatness of his possessions and how he had foregone all this beauty to
be hammered into the defilement of the trenches like a rat, cornered in
a sewer.

"Visitors are not allowed in the part of the Castle that is inhabited.
But, since her Ladyship's away----"

Unlocking a door, he led them through a tunnel to a grilled gate,
through the bars of which they saw the Castle's terraced rose-gardens,
falling away steeply in a cascade of petals to a water-lilied,
green-scummed moat which encircled the stronghold like a necklace of
jade. Beside the water's edge a fair-haired boy in a white sailor suit
was deeply absorbed in sailing a boat.

"His little Lordship," the old man whispered.

"But I didn't know---- How old?" Tabs questioned.

"Eight years, sir, come December."

Long after he had returned to the inn, the picture of the little boy
remained with him. This discovery that Lord Dawn had left a son made him
the more certain of the justice of his errand.

Th