e depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my
gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a
brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto
the grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance,
of littleness, of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my
cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany, and
Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before--but
one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a
long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to
guess: perhaps only the sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths
which gives a kind of majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of
Kerfol suggested something more--a perspective of stern and cruel
memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of
darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the
present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the
sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. "Tombs in the chapel?
The whole place is a tomb!" I reflected. I hoped more and more that the
guardian would not come. The details of the place, however striking,
would seem trivial compared with its collective impressiveness; and I
wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.

"It's the very place for you!" Lanrivain had said; and I was overcome by
the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that
Kerfol was the place for him. "Is it possible that any one could NOT
see--?" I wondered. I did not finish the thought: what I meant was
undefinable. I stood up and wandered toward the gate. I was beginning
to want to know more; not to SEE more--I was by now so sure it was not
a question of seeing--but to feel more: feel all the place had to
communicate. "But to get in one will have to rout out the keeper," I
thought reluctantly, and hesitated. Finally I crossed the bridge and
tried the iron gate. It yielded, and I walked under the tunnel formed
by the thickness of the chemin de ronde. At the farther end, a wooden
barricade had been laid across the entrance, and beyond it I saw a court
enclosed in noble architecture. The main building faced me; and I now
discovered that one half was a mere ruined front, with gaping windows
through which the wild growths of the moat and the tr