d.

I did wish for you to be with me then, and I'm ashamed to confess I
wouldn't have minded Sir Lionel as a companion, because Tintagel seems
so much more his than mine.

Never did I hear the sea talk poetry and legend as it does round those
dark rocks of old "Dundagel." I thought as I leaned out from my balcony,
a lonely, unappreciated Juliet--that the sound was like the chanting
voice of an ancient bard, telling stories of the golden days to himself
or to all who might care to listen. I fancied I could hear the words:

They found a naked child upon the sands
Of dark Dundagel by the Cornish sea.

I could see the ruined castle, on its twin cliffs, below the
hotel-castle cliff and between me and the sea; and the very meagreness
of what remains seemed to increase the interest and mystery by
stimulating the imagination, forcing it to create its own pictures. I
"reconstructed" the castle, building it of the same stone they use now
at Tintagel, and have used for the last thousand years or so; a dark
stone, singularly rich with colour--pansy and wallflower colour, with
splashes of green flung on to dead gray, like bright autumn leaves
stirred into a heap of other leaves dim and dead. And the mortar for my
masonry was the moonlight which flooded the sea and those wide downs
whose divisions into fields turned them into enormous maps.

I worked myself up into such a romantic mood that I almost cried in the
joy and pain of living, and expected to look back upon myself with the
"utmost spurn" when I should come back to real life after a good sleep
in the morning. But I didn't,--perhaps because, instead of encouraging
the good sleep, I lay and listened to the wild song of the Cornish wind.

I waked early, feeling exactly the same, if not more so, and could
hardly wait to get down into the ruins of the old castle. I splashed
about in a cold bath, dressed as quickly as a well-groomed girl can, and
then--I committed what might seem an indiscreet act if the last of the
Pendragons and I did not stand toward each other in the place of
guardian and ward. "Nothing is, but thinking makes it so." And Sir
Lionel certainly does think we're in those positions; therefore it was
all right for me to knock at his door, and ask through the keyhole if he
would very, very much mind taking me to the castle?

He was dressed, and opened the door instantly. It was the one thing he
would have liked to propose, said he, only he had been afra