The castle itself was a tremendous old pile, built on a rocky peninsula and surrounded on three sides by the waters of Appledore Harbour, It lay so as to face the entrance, which Verna told me was commanded—­or rather had been in years past—­by the guns of a half-moon battery that stood planted on a sort of third-story terrace.  It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels.  Verna and I had lunch together in a perfectly gorgeous old hall, with beams and carved panelling and antlers, and a fireplace you could have roasted an ox in, and rows of glistening suits of armour which the original ffrenches had worn when they had first started the family in life—­and all this, if you please, tete-a-tete with a woman who seemed to get more beautiful every minute I gazed at her, and who smiled back at me and called me Fyles, to the stupefaction of three noiseless six-footers in silk stockings.  Disapproving six-footers, too, whose gimlet eyes seemed to pierce my back as they sized up my clothes, which, as I said before, had suffered not a little by my trip, and my collar, which I’ll admit straight out wasn’t up to a castle standard, and the undeniable stain of machine-oil on my cuffs which I had got that morning in putting the machine to rights.  You ought to have seen the man that took my hat, which he did with the air of a person receiving pearls and diamonds on a golden platter, and smudged his lordly fingers with the grime of my Fourth of July.  And that darling of a girl, who never noticed my discomfiture, but whose eyes sparkled at times with a hidden merriment—­shall I ever forget her as she sat there and helped me to mutton-chops from simply priceless old Charles the First plate!

We had black coffee together in a window-seat overlooking the harbour and the ships, and she asked me a lot of questions about the war with Spain and my service in the Dixie.  She never moved a muscle when it came out I had been a quartermaster, though I could feel she was astounded at my being but a shade above a common seaman, and not, as she had taken it for granted, a commissioned officer.  I was too proud to explain over-much, or to tell her I had gone in, as so many of my friends had done, from a strong sense of duty and patriotism at the time of my country’s need, and consequently allowed her to get a very wrong idea, I suppose, about my state in life and position in the world.  Indeed, I was just childish enough to get a trifle wounded, and let her add misconception to misconception out of a silly obstinacy.

“But what do you do,” she asked, “now that the war is over and you’ve taken away everything from the poor Spaniards and left the Navy?”

“Work,” I said.

“What kind of work?” she asked.

“Oh, in an office!” I said. (I didn’t tell her I was the Third Vice President of the Amalgamated Copper Company, with a twenty-story building on lower Broadway.  Wild horses couldn’t have wrung it out of me then.)