mson sunset was reddening the river. A
little below us on the opposite bank, I saw what had been a village once
upon a time. But some agency of destruction had done its work there;
blackened spaces and heaped stones and the shells of dwellings rose tier
on tier among trees that seemed trying to hide them; only on the crest
of the bank, overlooking the wreck like a gloomy sentinel, one building
loomed intact, a dark, scarred, frowning castle with medieval walls and
towers. I stared at the scene of desolation.

"The Germans again!" I said.

"Yes," the girl assented, gazing across the water. "They came here at
the beginning of the war. They burned the houses and the huts and the
little church with the image of the Virgin and the tomb of the old
constable--all Prezelay except the chateau; and they only left that
standing to give their officers a home."

With an automatic action of feet and fingers, I stopped the car. Here
was the town that she had shown me on the map that morning when we sat
like a pair of whispering conspirators in the garden of the Three Kings.
The obstacles which had seemed so great had melted away before us. This
ruined village, this heap of stones cross the river, was our goal, the
key to our mystery, the last scene of our drama--Prezelay.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CASTLE AT PREZELAY

In the midst of my triumph, which was as intense as if I myself, instead
of pure luck, had engineered our journey, I became aware of a tiny qualm
as I sat gazing across the stream. Perhaps the gathering night affected
me, or the air, which was growing chilly, or the remnants of the
village, which were cheerless, to say the least. But that castle,
perched so darkly on its crag, with a strip of blood-red sky framing it,
was at the heart of my feeling. If it had been a nice, worldly-looking,
well-kept chateau, with poplared walks and a formal garden, I should
have welcomed it with open arms; but it wasn't, decidedly! It was the
threatening age-blackened sort of place that inevitably suggests Fulc of
Anjou, strongholds on the Loire, marauding barons, and the good old days
with their concomitants of rapine and robbery and death.

It was picturesque, but it was intensely gloomy; the proper spot for a
catastrophe rather than a happy denouement. I was not impressionable,
of course; but now that I thought of it, our jaunt had been going with
a smoothness almost ominous. Could one expect such clock-like regularity
to run foreve