"Thank you," I said, "but if it's all the same to you I don't
think I'd care to."

"I know awfully rich girls who are pretty too," she said, as
though forestalling an objection.

"I do too," I said, looking at her so earnestly that she coloured
up to the eyes.

"Oh, I am poor!" she said. "It's all we can do to keep the place
up. Besides--besides----" And then she stopped and looked out of
the window. I saw I had been a fool to be so personal, and I was
soon punished for my presumption, for she rose to her feet and
said in an altered voice that she would now show me the castle.

As I said before, it was a tremendous old place. It was a two-
hours' job to go through it even as we did, and then Verna said we
had skipped a whole raft of things she would let me see some other
time. There was a private theatre, a chapel with effigies of
cross-legged Crusaders, an armoury with a thousand stand of flint-
locks, a library, magnificent state apartments with wonderful
tapestries, a suite of rooms where they had confined a mad ffrench
in the fifteenth century, with the actual bloodstains on the floor
where he had dashed out his poor silly brains against the wall; a
magazine with a lot of empty powder-casks Cromwell had left there;
a vaulted chamber for the men of the half-moon battery; a well
which was said to have no bottom and which had remained unused for
a hundred years, because a wicked uncle had thrown the rightful
heir into it; and slimy, creepy-crawly dungeons with chains for
your hands and feet; and cachettes where they spilled you through