was edged with shabby farm-buildings an immense facade of dark time-stained brick, flanked by two low wings, each of which terminated in a little Dutch-looking pavilion capped with a fantastic roof.  Two towers rose behind, and behind the towers was a mass of elms and beeches, now just faintly green.  But the great feature was a wide, green river which washed the foundations of the chateau.  The building rose from an island in the circling stream, so that this formed a perfect moat spanned by a two-arched bridge without a parapet.  The dull brick walls, which here and there made a grand, straight sweep; the ugly little cupolas of the wings, the deep-set windows, the long, steep pinnacles of mossy slate, all mirrored themselves in the tranquil river.  Newman rang at the gate, and was almost frightened at the tone with which a big rusty bell above his head replied to him.  An old woman came out from the gate-house and opened the creaking portal just wide enough for him to pass, and he went in, across the dry, bare court and the little cracked white slabs of the causeway on the moat.  At the door of the chateau he waited for some moments, and this gave him a chance to observe that Fleurieres was not “kept up,” and to reflect that it was a melancholy place of residence.  “It looks,” said Newman to himself—­and I give the comparison for what it is worth—­“like a Chinese penitentiary.”  At last the door was opened by a servant whom he remembered to have seen in the Rue de l’Universite.  The man’s dull face brightened as he perceived our hero, for Newman, for indefinable reasons, enjoyed the confidence of the liveried gentry.  The footman led the way across a great central vestibule, with a pyramid of plants in tubs in the middle of glass doors all around, to what appeared to be the principal drawing-room of the chateau.  Newman crossed the threshold of a room of superb proportions, which made him feel at first like a tourist with a guide-book and a cicerone awaiting a fee.  But when his guide had left him alone, with the observation that he would call Madame la Comtesse, Newman perceived that the salon contained little that was remarkable save a dark ceiling with curiously carved rafters, some curtains of elaborate, antiquated tapestry, and a dark oaken floor, polished like a mirror.  He waited some minutes, walking up and down; but at length, as he turned at the end of the room, he saw that Madame de Cintre had come in by a distant door.  She wore a black dress, and she stood looking at him.  As the length of the immense room lay between them he had time to look at her before they met in the middle of it.

He was dismayed at the change in her appearance.  Pale, heavy-browed, almost haggard with a sort of monastic rigidity in her dress, she had little but her pure features in common with the woman whose radiant good grace he had hitherto admired.  She let her eyes rest on his own, and she let him take her hand; but her eyes looked like two rainy autumn moons, and her touch was portentously lifeless.