“Thank you,” I said, “but if it’s all the same to you I don’t think I’d care to.”

“I know awfully rich girls who are pretty too,” she said, as though forestalling an objection.

“I do too,” I said, looking at her so earnestly that she coloured up to the eyes.

“Oh, I am poor!” she said.  “It’s all we can do to keep the place up.  Besides—­besides——­” And then she stopped and looked out of the window.  I saw I had been a fool to be so personal, and I was soon punished for my presumption, for she rose to her feet and said in an altered voice that she would now show me the castle.

As I said before, it was a tremendous old place.  It was a two-hours’ job to go through it even as we did, and then Verna said we had skipped a whole raft of things she would let me see some other time.  There was a private theatre, a chapel with effigies of cross-legged Crusaders, an armoury with a thousand stand of flint-locks, a library, magnificent state apartments with wonderful tapestries, a suite of rooms where they had confined a mad ffrench in the fifteenth century, with the actual bloodstains on the floor where he had dashed out his poor silly brains against the wall; a magazine with a lot of empty powder-casks Cromwell had left there; a vaulted chamber for the men of the half-moon battery; a well which was said to have no bottom and which had remained unused for a hundred years, because a wicked uncle had thrown the rightful heir into it; and slimy, creepy-crawly dungeons with chains for your hands and feet; and cachettes where they spilled you through a hole in the floor, and let it go at that; and—­but what wasn’t there, indeed, in that extraordinary old feudal citadel, which had been in continuous human possession since the era of Hardicanute.  There seemed to be only one thing missing in the whole castle, and that was a bath—­though I dare say there was one in the private apartments not shown to me.  It was a regular dive into the last five hundred years, and the fact that it wasn’t a museum nor exploited by a sing-song cicerone, helped to make it for me a memorable and really thrilling experience.  I conjured up my forebears and could see them playing as children, growing to manhood, passing into old age, and finally dying in the shadow of those same massive walls.  Verna said I was quite pale when we emerged at last into the open air on the summit of the high square tower; and no wonder that I was, for in a kind of way I had been deeply impressed, and it seemed a solemn thing that I, like her, should be a child of this castle, with roots deep cast in far-off ages.

“Wouldn’t it be horrible,” I said, “if I found out I wasn’t a ffrench at all—­but had really sprung from a low-down, capital F family in the next county or somewhere!”

“Oh, but you are a real ffrench,” said Verna.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I can feel it,” she said.  “I never felt that kind of sensation before towards anybody except my father!”