“You must forgive me if I have not known what to do,” said Don Teodoro, humbly, but smiling also.  “I have seen something of civilization in my wanderings, but I never attempted to arrange a house before.  This is a very large house, if one calls such a place a house at all.”

“I suppose there are thirty or forty rooms?”

“There are three hundred and sixty-five altogether,” answered the priest, his smile broadening.  “They are all named in the inventory.  There is a legend about the place to the effect that there is a three hundred and sixty-sixth, which no one can find.  Of course the inventory includes every roofed space between walls, from the dungeon at the top of the keep to the dark room under the trap-door in the last hall on this lower story.  But you will be surprised, to-morrow, if you go over the place.  It is much bigger than seems possible, because you can never really see it from outside unless you go down into the plain.”

“And where do you think that other room is?” asked Veronica, who was young enough to take interest in the mystery.

“Heaven knows!  Perhaps it does not exist at all.  But as I was saying, my dear princess, I found it hard to arrange an apartment for you, not knowing how you might choose to select your quarters.  So I had the tapestries cleaned and hung up, and the chairs dusted and the tables polished, and some lights got ready on this floor, and your bedroom is the last.”

“The one with the trap-door?” asked Veronica.  “That is very amusing!”

“I had the dark room below well cleaned, and the trap has been screwed down,” said Don Teodoro.  “I thought that there might be rats there.  Elettra has the room before yours.  But you are tired, and you must be hungry.  It is my fault for not leaving you at once.”

“But you will dine with me?  To-night and every night, Don Teodoro—­that is understood.”

Half an hour later, they sat down to table in the light of the lamp and the six candles, in the room from which Veronica had looked out upon the valley.  But they were both too tired to talk, though they made faint attempts at conversation, and as soon as the meal was over, the old priest begged leave to go home.

“Do not be afraid,” he said, as he bade Veronica good night.  “There are several men in the house.  You are not all alone with your five women.  The foresters have their headquarters here.”

Veronica was anything but timid or nervous, but when she was in bed in her own room at the south corner of the castle, watching the shadows cast up by the flickering night light upon the ancient tapestries, she realized that she was very lonely indeed, she and scarcely a dozen servants, in the vast fortress wherein a thousand men had once found ample room to live.  Brave as she was, she glanced once or twice at the corner of the room where the trap-door was placed.  There was a carpet over it, and a table stood there which Elettra had arranged hastily for the toilet table.  Veronica wondered what end that dark place below had served in ancient days, and whether she were not perhaps lying in the very room in which Queen Joanna had been smothered by the two Hungarian soldiers.  It seemed probable.