es, and
helped her to alight. We started up the hill together without a word.

Two ghosts! More and more, as we climbed through the wreck and
desolation, that was what we seemed. The road was choked with stones
between which the grass was sprouting; there was nothing left of the
little church save a single pointed shaft. We climbed rapidly, the girl
always gazing up at the castle with that same feverish eagerness. She
had forgotten, I think, that I was there.

At last we were coming to the hilltop and the chateau. Rather
breathless, I studied its looming walls, its turrets, its three round
towers. It looked dark and inexplicably menacing, but I had recovered my
form and could defy it. When we halted at a great iron-studded oak gate
and Miss Falconer pulled the bell-rope, I was astonished. It had not
occurred to me that the castle would be more inhabited than the town.

Nor was it, apparently; for no one answered its summons, though I could
hear the bell jingling faintly somewhere within. Miss Falconer rang a
second time, then a third; her face shone white in the moonlight; she
was growing anxious.

"Did you think," I ventured finally, "that there was some one here?"

"Yes; Marie-Jeanne," she answered, listening intently. Then she roused
herself. "I mean the _gardienne_. She never left, not even when the
Germans came. They made her cook for them; she said she had been born in
the keeper's lodge, and her grandfather before her, and that she would
rather die at Prezelay than go to any other place. But of course she
may have walked down the river for the evening. Her son's wife is at
Santierre, two miles off. She may be there."

"That's it," I agreed hastily, the more hastily because I doubted.
"She's sitting over a fire, toasting her toes, and gossiping and having
a cup of tea, or whatever people like that use for an equivalent in
these parts." I suppressed the unwelcome thought that a woman living
here alone ran a first-rate chance of getting her throat cut by
strolling vagrants. "Shall we have to wait until she comes back?" I
asked. "Then let's sit down. I choose this stone!"

On my last word, however, something surprising happened. Miss Falconer,
in her impatience, put a hand on the bolt of the gate, shook it, and
raised it, and, lo and behold! the oak frame swung open. Before I quite
realized the situation, we were inside, in a square courtyard, with
the _gardienne's_ lodge at the right of us, impenetrably barre