Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/250

234 itself in a great hurry, before I could even catch it by its lizard-tail. "Was she with you when you were here before?"

"She?" he echoed. "I don't understand."

"The lady of the battlement garden," I explained, ashamed and repentant now that it was too late.

He did not answer for a moment Then he laughed, an odd sort of laugh. "Oh, my romance of the battlement garden?Yes, she was with me in this gorge. She is with me now."

"I wonder if she is thinking about you to-night?" I asked, knowing he meant that the mysterious lady was carried along on this journey in his spirit, as I was in the car.

"Not seriously, if at all," he answered, with what seemed to me a forced lightness. "But I am thinking of her—thoughts which she will probably never know."

Then I did wish that I, too, had a hidden sorrow in my life, a man in the background, but as unlike Monsieur Charretier as possible, for whose love I could call upon my brother's sympathy. And I suppose it was because he had some one, while I had no one, in this strange, hidden fairyland like a secret orchard of jewelled fruits, that I felt suddenly very sad.

He pointed out Castlebouc, a spellbound château on a towering crag that held it up as if on a tall black finger, above a village which might have fallen off a canvas by Gustave Doré. Farther on lay a strange place called Prades, memorable for a huge buttress of rock exactly like the carcass of a mammoth petrified and hanging on a wall. Then, farther on still, over the black face of the