country nearer his size.

By the time we had reached the cliffs and began to perceive the
high grey walls of the castle in the distance, Verna and I were
faster friends than ever, and anyone seeing us together would have
thought we had known each other all our lives. I felt more and
more happy to think I had met her first in this unconventional
way, for as the castle loomed up closer and we passed gardeners
and keepers and jockeys with a string of race-horses out for
exercise, I felt that my pretty companion was constrained by the
sight of these obsequious faces and changing by gradations into
what she really was, the daughter of the castle and by right of
blood one of the great ladies of the countryside.

The castle itself was a tremendous old pile, built on a rocky
peninsula and surrounded on three sides by the waters of Appledore
Harbour, It lay so as to face the entrance, which Verna told me
was commanded--or rather had been in years past--by the guns of a
half-moon battery that stood planted on a sort of third-story
terrace. It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in
its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir
Walter Scott's novels. Verna and I had lunch together in a
perfectly gorgeous old hall, with beams and carved panelling and
antlers, and a fireplace you could have roasted an ox in, and rows
of glistening suits of armour which the original ffrenches had
worn when they had first started the family in life--and all this,
if you please, tete-a-tete with a woman who seemed to get more
beautiful every minute I gazed at her, and who smiled back at me
and called me Fyles, to the stupefaction of three noiseless six-
footers in silk stockings. Disapproving six-footers, too, whose