casino, a _plage_, and a Hotel des Bains, or
nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque
wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had
once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was
blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a
still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties
only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voila, monsieur--voila le chateau de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same
instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose
castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that
he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal
passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath
portcullis--or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal
pile--into the presence of the chatelaine whose abode here must be that
of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories
came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for
this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the role the
more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and
fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed
as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the
plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely
as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the
prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in
both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid
here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of
Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky
cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been
carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had
driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois
which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the
first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through
which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile
farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had
stopped, the chateau was composed of two ancient t