the Chateau de Vasselot.

Within the crumbling walls, built on the sheer edge of the rock, stood,
amid a disorderly thicket of bamboo and feathery pepper and deep copper
beech, a square stone house with smokeless chimneys, and, so far as was
visible, every shutter shut. The owner of it and all these lands, the
bearer of the name that was written here upon the map, walked slowly out
into the open country. He turned once and looked back at the towering
cliff behind him, the rocky peninsula where the Casa Perucca stood amidst
its great trees, and hid the village of Olmeta, perched on the mountain
side behind it.

The short winter twilight was almost gone before de Vasselot reached the
base of the mound of half-shattered rock upon which the chateau had been
built. The wall that had once been the outer battlement of the old
stronghold was so fallen into disrepair that he anticipated no difficulty
in finding a gap through which to pass within the enclosure where the
house was hidden; but he walked right round and found no such breach.
Where the wall of rock proved vulnerable, the masonry, by some curious
chance, was invariably sound.

It had not been de Vasselot's intention to disturb the old gardener, who,
he understood, was left in charge of the crumbling house, but to return
the next day with the Abbe Susini. But he was tired, and having failed to
gain an entrance, was put out and angry, when at length he found himself
near the great door built in the solid wall on the north-west side of the
ruin. A rusty bell-chain was slowly swinging in the wind, which was
freshening again at sunset, as the mistral nearly always does when it is
dying. With some difficulty he succeeded in swinging the heavy bell
suspended inside the door, so that it gave two curt clangs as of a rusty