By the time that the Boy and I had been led, like stalled oxen, through a long series of living-rooms, I knowing that the rightful inhabitants were panting in wardrobes, my nerves were shattered.  I admired everything, volubly but hastily, and broke into fireworks of adjectives, always edging a little nearer to the exit, though not, I regret to say, invariably aided by the Boy.  He, indeed, seemed to find an impish pleasure in my discomfiture.

During the round, I was dimly conscious that the entire staff of servants, most of them maids, and embarrassingly beautiful, flitted after us like the ghosts who accompanied Dante and his guide on their tour of the Seven Circles.  As, at last, we returned to the square entrance hail, they melted out of sight, still like shadows, and I had a final moment of extreme anguish when, at the door, the housekeeper refused the ten francs I attempted to press into her haughty Italian palm.

“No more afternoon calls on chateaux for me, after that experience,” I gasped, when we were safely seated in the homelike vehicle which I had not sufficiently appreciated before.

“Oh, I shall be disappointed if you won’t go with me to the Chateau of St. Pierre which we saw in the photograph—­that quaint mass of towers and pinnacles, on the very top of a peaked rock,” said the Boy.  “I’ve been looking forward to it more than to anything else, but I shan’t have courage to do it alone.”

“Courage?” I echoed.  “After the brazen way in which you stalked through the scattered belongings of the family at Aymaville, you would stop at nothing.”

“In other words, I suppose you think me a typical Yankee boy?  But I really was nervous, and inclined to apologise to somebody for being alive.  That’s why I can’t go through another such ordeal without company; yet I wouldn’t miss this eleventh-century castle for a bag of your English sovereigns.”

“If only it had been left alone, and not restored!” I groaned.  “In that case we should meet no one but bats.”

“We?  Then you will go with me?”

“I suppose so,” I sighed.  “It can’t add more than a dozen grey hairs, and what are they among so many?”

A few kilometres further on we reached the “bizarre monticule,” from which sprouted a still more bizarre chateau.  From our low level, it was impossible to tell where the rock stopped, and where the castle began, so deftly had man seized every point of vantage offered by Nature—­and “points” they literally were.

The ascent from the road to the chateau was much like climbing a fire-escape to the top of a New York sky-scraper, but we earned the right to cry “Excelsior!” at last, had we not by that moment been speechless.  History now repeated itself.  I rang; the castle gate was opened, but this time by a major-domo who had already in some marvellous way learned that strangers might be expected.