olubly but hastily, and broke into fireworks of
adjectives, always edging a little nearer to the exit, though not, I
regret to say, invariably aided by the Boy. He, indeed, seemed to find
an impish pleasure in my discomfiture.

During the round, I was dimly conscious that the entire staff of
servants, most of them maids, and embarrassingly beautiful, flitted
after us like the ghosts who accompanied Dante and his guide on their
tour of the Seven Circles. As, at last, we returned to the square
entrance hail, they melted out of sight, still like shadows, and I had
a final moment of extreme anguish when, at the door, the housekeeper
refused the ten francs I attempted to press into her haughty Italian
palm.

"No more afternoon calls on chateaux for me, after _that_ experience,"
I gasped, when we were safely seated in the homelike vehicle which I
had not sufficiently appreciated before.

"Oh, I shall be disappointed if you won't go with me to the Chateau of
St. Pierre which we saw in the photograph--that quaint mass of towers
and pinnacles, on the very top of a peaked rock," said the Boy. "I've
been looking forward to it more than to anything else, but I shan't
have courage to do it alone."

"Courage?" I echoed. "After the brazen way in which you stalked
through the scattered belongings of the family at Aymaville, you would
stop at nothing."

"In other words, I suppose you think me a typical Yankee boy? But I
really was nervous, and inclined to apologise to somebody for being
alive. That's why I can't go through another such ordeal without
company; yet I wouldn't miss this eleventh-century castle for a bag of
your English sovereigns."

"If only it had been left alone, and not restored!" I groaned. "In
that case we should meet no one but bats."

"We? Then you will go with me?"

"I suppose so," I sighed. "It can't add more than a dozen grey hairs,
and what are they among so many?"

A few kilometres further on we reached the "bizarre monticule," from
which sprouted a still more bizarre chateau. From our low level, it
was impossible to tell where the rock stopped, and where the castle
began, so deftly had man seized every point of vantage offered by
Nature--and "points" they literally were.

The ascent from the road to the chateau was much like climbing a
fire-escape to the top of a New York sky-scraper, but we earned the
right to cry "Excelsior!" at last, had we not by that moment been
speechless. History now repea