door, and leave word with my neighbor on the next floor that I am gone
out for the day,"

So she locked the door and left the message, and we started. I was
fortunate enough to find a close cab at the corner of the _marché_--she
would have preferred an open one, but I overruled that objection on the
score of time--and before very long we were seated in the cushioned
fauteuils of a first-class compartment on the Orleans Railway, and
speeding away towards Montlhéry.

It was with no trifling sense of relief that I found the place really
picturesque, when we arrived. We had, it is true, to put up with a
comfortless drive of three or four miles in a primitive, jolting, yellow
omnibus, which crawled at stated hours of the day between the town and
the station; but that was a minor evil, and we made the best of it.
First of all, we strolled through the village--the clean, white, sunny
village, where the people were sitting outside their doors playing at
dominoes, and the cocks and hens were walking about like privileged
inhabitants of the market-place. Then we had luncheon at the _auberge_
of the "Lion d'Or." Then we looked in at the little church (still
smelling of incense from the last service) with its curious old
altar-piece and monumental brasses. Then we peeped through the iron gate
of the melancholy _cimetière_, which was full of black crosses and
wreaths of _immortelles_. Last of all, we went to see the ruin, which
stood on the summit of a steep and solitary rock in the midst of a vast
level plain. It proved to be a round keep of gigantic strength and
height, approached by two courtyards and surrounded by the weed-grown
and fragmentary traces of an extensive stronghold, nothing of which now
remained save a few broken walls, three or four embrasured loopholes, an
ancient well of incalculable depth, and the rusted teeth of a formidable