It was a rambling, straggling building, apparently constructed at different times; having two wings and a wide central hall, with odd projecting chambers, and it was hidden so cunningly away that it was visible from this side of the lake only from the point of the rocky precipice above on which I stood.

The chateau stood under the overhanging precipice in such a way that half the building was invisible even from here.  It seemed to be set back into a hollow of the mountainside, which appeared every moment about to overwhelm it.

And now I perceived that the smooth slope on which I stood was a snow-covered glacier, a million tons of ice, pressing ever by its own weight toward the precipice, and carrying its debris of rocks and stones toward the waterfall that issued from it and poured in deafening clamour into the lake below.

Where the precipice projected the waterfall was split in two, and rushed down in twin streams, bubbling, tumbling, hissing, plunging into the lake, which whirled furiously around the spit of land on which the castle stood, clear of ice for a distance of a hundred feet from the shore, a foaming maelstrom in which no boat that was ever built could have endured an instant, but must have been twisted and flung back like the fantastically shaped ice pinnacles along the marge.

On each side of the chateau a cataract plunged, veiling itself in an opacity of mist, tinted with all the spectral hues by the rays of the westering sun.  I could have flung a stone down, not on the chateau, but over it, into the boiling lake.

Why, that position was impregnable!  Behind it the sheer precipice, up which not even a bird could walk; the impassable lake before it, and the torrent on either side!

But—­how had M. Charles Duchaine gained entrance there?

There seemed to be no entrance.  And yet the chateau stood before my eyes, no dream, but very real indeed.  There was a small piece of enclosed land between its front and the lake, and within this I thought I could see dogs lying.

That might have been my fancy, for the mountain was too high for me to be able to distinguish anything readily, and the sublime grandeur of the scene and the roar of the water made me incapable of clear discernment.

Before I reached the hut again I had formulated my plan.  I would start at dawn, or earlier, and work around these mountains, a circuit of perhaps twenty miles, approaching the chateau by the edge of the lake.  I concluded that there must exist a ridge of narrow beach between the whirlpool and the castle, though it was invisible from above, and that the entrance would disclose itself to me in the course of my journey.

The hope of finding Jacqueline again banished the last vestiges of my weakness.  I felt like one inspired.  And my spirit was exalted, too.  For she so completely filled my heart that she left no place for doubts and fears.