The man was distinctly amused, but he was touched too.
An old manservant, with a faint, indescribable old-world air, that fitted in with the château and the garden and the roses somehow, brought food to the stranger, and, after he had eaten, showed him to his room.
The stranger looked round him with interest.
It was a large apartment, large and bare and old—but everything at Ancelles was old.
But the curtains to the bed, faded now, had once been rich and handsome. The tapestry across the door of a smaller room leading from the other, was still beautiful though worn with age.
Hugh Michelhurst shivered a little as he stood there, in the dim, dark, old-world chamber. There was something pathetic in the tale it told of bygone splendour, something sad and forlorn.
Then his eye fell on a bowl of vivid red roses standing on his dressing-table, and he smiled.
They at least were not old. Their splendour was undimmed. There was nothing faded in their fresh, glowing beauty; and who had put them there?
He went closer; he bent over them and drank in their sweet scent. And as he did it the old, sunny garden rose before him again. The little twisting paths, the roses so thick and luxuriant that they trespassed forward from their beds; the old broken fountain, with the water nymph bending eternally in graceful readiness to dive, and amongst them—the roses, the sunshine, the queer paths, and the old fountain—the little mistress of them all, slim, childish, with soft dark eyes, with pretty lips made for laughter, with the sun caught in the waves of her brown hair. His hands wandered gently over the roses as he stood and thought what a gracious little hostess she was! How sweetly she had welcomed him, asking no questions!
A wave of colour surged over his white face.