Fauchard, the ranger's, cottage lay at the meeting of two drives; all the trees here were pines, and the air was filled with their balsam.

It was, even in 1869, an old-fashioned cottage, set back in a clearing amidst the trees. The tall pines seemed to have stepped back to give it room, and were eternally blowing their compliments to it. Ah, they were fine fellows to live amongst, those pine-trees, true noblemen of the forest, erect as grenadiers, spruce, perfumed; and the blue sky looked never so beautiful as when seen over their tops.

The cottage had an old wooden gallery under the upper windows, and an outside staircase gone to decay; the porch was covered with rambler roses; on the apex of the red-tiled roof pigeons white as pearls sat in strings, fluttering now to the ground, and now circling in the blue above the trees like a ring of smoke.

It was a place wherein to taste the beauty of summer to the very dregs. Dawn, coming down the pine-set drive, touching the branches with her fingers and setting the woods a-shiver, peeped into Fauchard's cottage as she never peeped into the Tuileries. Noon sat with folded hands before the rose-strewn porch, singing to herself a song which mortals heard in the croonings of the pigeons. Dusk set glow-worms, like little lamps, amidst the roses of the porch.

When we arrived, Fauchard was out, but his wife was in and received us. Madame Fauchard was over seventy; a woman as clean and bright as a new pin, active as a cat; a woman who had brought twelve children into the world, yet had worked all her life as hard as a man.

Oh, yes! she would be very glad to take a lodger, if he would be satisfied with their simple place. She showed us over the little house. It smelt sweet as lavender, and the spare room was so close to the trees that the pine-branches almost brushed the window.

"It will be lovely for him," said Eloise, when, having settled about terms with Fauchard's wife, we were taking our way back to the Pavilion. "But will he find it dull when he is not writing his music?"

"If he does," said I, "he can come over to the Pavilion and see you. Then he will love Etiolles, where he will, no doubt, find friends; and he has the woods, and Fauchard will take him out with him. Oh, no; he will not find it dull."

"Toto," said Eloise, as though suddenly remembering something, just as we reached the drawbridge.

"Yes."

"You remember the day before yesterday you said you would show me over the chÂteau the next time you came. Let us go over it now."

"Very well," I replied. "Wait for me here, and I will get the key."

The ChÂteau de Saluce had not been lived in for years—ever since my mother's death, in fact. But it had been well cared for. Fires had been lit every fortnight or so to air the rooms during the autumn and winter; every room had been left in exactly the same state it was in at my mother's death, and the gardens had been tended and looked after as though the family were in residence.

"When you marry," said my guardian, "it will make a very nice present for your wife. Let it! Good God, Patrique, are we shopkeepers?"

"Here's the key," said I, coming back to Eloise, who had waited for me at the angle of the drawbridge. She was standing with her elbow on the drawbridge rail, and her eyes fixed on the water. She seemed paler than when I had left her; and when I touched her arm she drew her gaze away from the water lingeringly, as if fascinated by something she had seen there.

"Toto," said Eloise, "are there fish in the moat?"

"I never hear of any. Why?"

"I saw something white and flat," said Eloise, "deep down. I first thought it was a flat-fish, then it looked like a ball of mist in the water deep down, and then it looked like a—a face."

"A face!" said I, laughing, and looking over the bridge-rail and down into the water.

"I know it was only fancy," said Eloise. "Perhaps I went asleep for a second and dreamed it. It felt like a dream, and I felt just as a person feels wakened up from sleep when you touched me on the arm just now. It was a man's face, pale, and—and—— Ah, well, it was perhaps only my imagination!"

She shivered, and took my arm; and I led her along a by-path that took us to the carriage drive and the front door of the chÂteau.

The great hall, with its oak gallery and ceiling painted by Boucher, echoed our footsteps and our voices.

This echo was the defect of the hall, as I have often heard my father say. The builder of the place had, by some mischance, imprisoned an echo. She was there, and nothing would dislodge her—everything had been tried. Architects from Paris had been consulted—even the great Violette Le Duc himself—without avail. She was there like a ghost, and nothing would drive her out. Whether she was hiding in the gallery or the coigns of the ceiling, who can say? But one thing was certain: her voice changed. It was sometimes louder, sometimes lower, sometimes harsher, sometimes sweeter; a change caused, I believe, by atmospheric influence. But superstition takes no account of atmospheric influence or natural causes. Superstition said that the echo was the voice of Marianne de Saluce, a girl famed for her beautiful voice, who, like Antonina in the Violon de Cremone, had died singing, under tragic circumstances, one winter day here in the hall of the chÂteau, in the late years of the reign of his sun-like Majesty Louis XIV.

"The blood flowing from her mouth had mixed with her song," said the old chronicle; and this, with the fact that she was wild, wayward, and bad, gave superstition groundwork for a conceit not without charm.

"Marianne!" cried Eloise, when I had told her this tale; and "Marianna—Marianne!" the ghostly voice replied.

Eloise laughed, and Marianne laughed in reply all along the gallery, as though she were running from room to room; and, to my mind, made fanciful by the recollection of the old legend, it seemed that there was something sinister and sneering in the laughter of Marianne.

Then I called out myself, making my voice as deep as possible; and the answer was so horrible as to make us both start. For it was as though a woman, leaning over the gallery and imitating my man's voice, were mocking me.

I have never heard anything more hobgoblin, if I may use the expression.

"Ugh!" said Eloise. "Don't speak to her any more. Speak in whispers; don't give her the satisfaction of answering. Toto, are those men in armour your ancestors?"

"They are the shells of old Saluces," I replied. "Eloise, do you remember the man in armour in the tower of Lichtenberg—the one who struck the bell?"

"Don't speak of him," said Eloise; "at least, here. The place is ghostly enough. Shall we go upstairs?"

We went up the broad staircase, peeped into the sitting-rooms and boudoirs of the first floor, and then up another flight of stairs to the floor of the bedrooms.

"See the funny little staircase?" said Eloise, when we had looked into the bedrooms, ghostly and deserted. She was pointing to a narrow staircase leading from the corridor we were in.

"Let's see where it goes," said I, for it was years since I had explored this part of the chÂteau. "It looks ugly and wicked enough to lead to a Bluebeard's chamber."

But it did not. It led to a turret room, with four windows looking north, south, east, and west. A charming little room, with a painted ceiling, on which cupids disported themselves with doves.

Faded rose-coloured couches were placed at each window; on a table in the centre lay some old books, dust on their covers. The view was superb.

One window showed the forest, another the Seine winding blue through the country of spring, another the country of fields and gardens, vineyards, and far white roads.

The smoke of Etiolles made a wreath above the poplar-trees.

We sat down on a couch by the window overlooking Etiolles. We were so close together that I could feel the warmth of her arm against mine, and her hand hanging loose beside her was so close to mine that I took it without thinking. The picture outside, the picture of Nature and the wind-blown trees over which the larks were carolling and the small white clouds drifting, contrasted strangely with the room we were in and the silence of the great empty house. The little hand lying in mine suddenly curled its little finger around my thumb.

"Eloise!" I said.

She turned her head, her breath, sweet and warm, met my face. Then I kissed her, not as a brother but as a lover.