Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/109

 the castle. And to save time I insisted on Brown lunching with us. That's happened before several times, so that it doesn't seem at all strange now, though Aunt Mary fussed at first, and even I felt rather funny. But the queer part is, it's so much more difficult to remember that Brown's not a gentleman than to make an effort to be civil to him as if he were one. Rattray at the table was beyond words, and so are a lot of Frenchmen who ought to know better; but—you'll laugh at me—I don't see how a duke could eat any better than Brown, or have nicer hands and nails; though how he does it with the car to clean is more than I can tell.

We came towards the castle, after déjeuner, from the back through the town, which was gay with booths and blue blouses and pretty peasant girls, because the market was being held. We went right through the crowd, up, up a sloping path, where suddenly we were in a restful silence, after the chattering and chaffering below. And I felt as if we had got into a novel of Scott's; for if we'd been his characters he would have brought us up short at a secretive door in a tower, just like the one where we had to knock. One couldn't guess what would be on the other side of that tower; and it was like walking on through the next chapter of the same novel (walking slowly and with dignity, so that we might "live up to" the author of our being) to wander up a steep road leading to a plateau and reach the still, formal garden with the great castle rising out of it.

On this plateau a lovely thing simply took my