't required any quarterings of nobility
from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's a
robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying
tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair
and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike,
probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union
crossbowmen."

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the
civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he
meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can
have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."

"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. And
perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."

"Have you been doing something very wicked?"

"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered.

"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you," she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a
village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A
church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a
darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind
him. He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's
claims upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their
wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it;
at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would
admit them.

XXXVI.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the
hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted
more directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,
bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean
bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads
no such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us
with in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all
her store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to
find flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for
her. She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both
hands for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin