Long since out of range of the smoke cloud rising in the morning sky, Richard Barrington and Seth urged their horses along the road.

“Is this a wise journey?” Seth asked suddenly.

“I cannot tell.”

“Paris might be safer.”

“I promised to carry a message to a woman,” Barrington answered.  “The man is dead; there remains my oath.  Somewhere before us lies the Chateau of Beauvais, and that is the way we go.”

CHAPTER III

BEAUVAIS

There are few fairer spots in this world than Beauvais.  He who has dreamed of an earthly paradise and sought it out, might well rest here contented, satisfied.  It lies at the top of a long, ascending valley which twists its way upward from the Swiss frontier into the hills, a rough and weary road to travel, yet with a new vista of beauty at every turn.  Here are wooded slopes where a dryad might have her dwelling; yonder some ragged giant towers toward heaven, his scarred rocky shoulders capped with snow.  Below, deep down from the road cut in the hillside, undulate green pastures, the cattle so small at this distance that they might be toys set there after a child’s fancy; while a torrent leaping joyously from ledge to ledge might be a babbling brook but for the sound of its full music which comes upward on the still air, telling of impetuous force and power.  Here eternity seems to have an habitation, and time to be a thing of naught.  The changing seasons may come and go, storm and tempest may spend their rage, and summer heat and winter frost work their will, yet that rocky height shall still climb into cloudland, and those green pastures shall flourish.  Centuries ago, eyes long blinded by the dust of death looked upon this fair scene and understood something of its everlasting nature; centuries hence, other eyes shall behold its beauty and still dream of a distant future.  We are but children of a day, brilliant ephemera flashing in a noontide sun; these silent, watching hills have known generations of others like us, as brilliant and as short-lived; shall know generations more, unborn as yet, unthought of.

At the head of this valley, rising suddenly from a stretch of level land, is a long hill lying like a wedge, its thin edge resting on the plain.  The sides, as they get higher, become more precipitous, but from the thin edge there ascends a road about which houses cluster, irregular and pointed roofs rising one above the other in strange confusion until they are crowned at the summit by the chateau standing like their protector to face and defy the world.  To the right, dominating the whole of this region, is the great double peak, snow-clad and often cloud-bound, which seems to stand sentinel for the surrounding mountains as the castle does to the valley; God’s work and the work of man.  He who first built his castle there knew well that in might lay right, and chose