“I’m to drive to the chateau?” I inquired with recovered cheerfulness.  I had to repeat the words before they broke her trance.

“Yes,” she answered.  Suddenly, impulsively, she turned toward me, her face almost feverish, her eyes astonishingly large and bright.  “I haven’t told you much,” she acknowledged tremulously; “but you won’t think that I don’t trust you.  It is only that I couldn’t talk of it and keep my courage; and I must keep it a little longer—­until we know the truth.”

“That’s quite all right, Miss Falconer.”  I was switching on the lamps.  Then I extinguished them; their clear acetylene glare seemed almost weirdly out of place.  “We can muddle along without any lights.  Not much traffic here,” I muttered.  I had a feeling, anyhow, that unostentatiousness of approach might not be bad.

There was intense silence about us; not even a breeze was stirring.  A thin crescent moon was out, silvering the river and the trees.  The road was atrocious; on one dark stretch the car, rocking into a rut, jolted us viciously and brought my teeth together on the tip of my tongue.

“Sorry,” I gasped, between humiliation and pain.

With the silence and the dimness, we were like ghosts, the car like a phantom.  An old stone bridge seemed to beckon us, and we crossed to the other side.  There, at Miss Falconer’s gesture, I drew the automobile off the road at the edge of the town, halted it beneath some trees, and helped her to alight.  We started up the hill together without a word.

Two ghosts!  More and more, as we climbed through the wreck and desolation, that was what we seemed.  The road was choked with stones between which the grass was sprouting; there was nothing left of the little church save a single pointed shaft.  We climbed rapidly, the girl always gazing up at the castle with that same feverish eagerness.  She had forgotten, I think, that I was there.

At last we were coming to the hilltop and the chateau.  Rather breathless, I studied its looming walls, its turrets, its three round towers.  It looked dark and inexplicably menacing, but I had recovered my form and could defy it.  When we halted at a great iron-studded oak gate and Miss Falconer pulled the bell-rope, I was astonished.  It had not occurred to me that the castle would be more inhabited than the town.

Nor was it, apparently; for no one answered its summons, though I could hear the bell jingling faintly somewhere within.  Miss Falconer rang a second time, then a third; her face shone white in the moonlight; she was growing anxious.

“Did you think,” I ventured finally, “that there was some one here?”

“Yes; Marie-Jeanne,” she answered, listening intently.  Then she roused herself.  “I mean the gardienne.  She never left, not even when the Germans came.  They made her cook for them; she said she had been born in the keeper’s lodge, and her grandfather before her, and that she would rather die at Prezelay than go to any other place.  But of course she may have walked down the river for the evening.  Her son’s wife is at Santierre, two miles off.  She may be there.”