double manoir--two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far
back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been
the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked
with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of
Latour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonely
manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when
the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring
lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so
dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed
away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the
younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the
kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight,
the building of a second manor-house--the Chateau d'Amour, as it came
to be called--that the two families, in what should be as nearly as
possible one abode, might take their fortunes together.

Of somewhat finer construction than the rough walls of the older
manor, the Chateau d'Amour stood, amid the change of years, as a
visible record of all the accumulated sense of human existence among
its occupants. The old walls, the old apartments, of those two
associated houses still existed, with some obvious additions, beneath
the delicate, fantastic surfaces of the chateau [4] of the sixteenth
century. Its singularity of outline was the very symbol of the
religion of the family in the race of Latour, still full of loyalty
to the old home, as its numerous outgrowths took hold here and there
around. A race with some prominent characteristics ineradicable in
the grain, they went to raise the human level about them by a
transfer of blood, far from involving any social decadence in
themselves. A peculiar local variety of character, of manners, in
that district of La Beauce, surprised the more observant visitor who