“Very well,” said Andre-Louis.  “It shall be as you please.  But nothing shall prevent me at least from walking with you as far as the chateau, and waiting for you while you make your appeal to M. de Kercadiou.”

And so they left the house good friends, for the sweetness of M. de Vilmorin’s nature did not admit of rancour, and together they took their way up the steep main street of Gavrillac.

CHAPTER II

THE ARISTOCRAT

The sleepy village of Gavrillac, a half-league removed from the main road to Rennes, and therefore undisturbed by the world’s traffic, lay in a curve of the River Meu, at the foot, and straggling halfway up the slope, of the shallow hill that was crowned by the squat manor.  By the time Gavrillac had paid tribute to its seigneur — partly in money and partly in service — tithes to the Church, and imposts to the King, it was hard put to it to keep body and soul together with what remained.  Yet, hard as conditions were in Gavrillac, they were not so hard as in many other parts of France, not half so hard, for instance, as with the wretched feudatories of the great Lord of La Tour d’Azyr, whose vast possessions were at one point separated from this little village by the waters of the Meu.

The Chateau de Gavrillac owed such seigneurial airs as might be claimed for it to its dominant position above the village rather than to any feature of its own.  Built of granite, like all the rest of Gavrillac, though mellowed by some three centuries of existence, it was a squat, flat-fronted edifice of two stories, each lighted by four windows with external wooden shutters, and flanked at either end by two square towers or pavilions under extinguisher roofs.  Standing well back in a garden, denuded now, but very pleasant in summer, and immediately fronted by a fine sweep of balustraded terrace, it looked, what indeed it was, and always had been, the residence of unpretentious folk who found more interest in husbandry than in adventure.

Quintin de Kercadiou, Lord of Gavrillac — Seigneur de Gavrillac was all the vague title that he bore, as his forefathers had borne before him, derived no man knew whence or how — confirmed the impression that his house conveyed.  Rude as the granite itself, he had never sought the experience of courts, had not even taken service in the armies of his King.  He left it to his younger brother, Etienne, to represent the family in those exalted spheres.  His own interests from earliest years had been centred in his woods and pastures.  He hunted, and he cultivated his acres, and superficially he appeared to be little better than any of his rustic metayers.  He kept no state, or at least no state commensurate with his position or with the tastes of his niece Aline de Kercadiou.  Aline, having spent some two years in the court atmosphere of Versailles under the aegis of her uncle Etienne, had ideas very different from