“I don’t care. I feel as if I’d rather stay at home now.”
“No, no; I won’t tease. Shall we go as far as the town?”
“No; anywhere you like.”
“Say somewhere.”
“Not I. You’ll only tease me, and say I had some reason. I’ll only go where you choose.”
“Then you shall, dear. We’ll go up the east glen to the fall, and then cross over the hill and come back by the west glen, and you shall tease me as much as you like.”
“I don’t want to tease you.”
Mary made a grimace as she looked sidewise at herself, but she coloured a little, and was silent for a time.
They were already some hundred yards from the great, grey granite mansion, which stood upon a bald bluff of cliff, built within the past thirty years, and by the fancy of its architect made to resemble a stronghold of the Norman times, with its battlements, towers, frowning gateway, moat and drawbridge crossing the deep channel, kept well filled by a spring far up in one of the glens at the back, while the front of the solid-looking, impregnable edifice frowned down upon the glittering sea.
“See how grand Castle Dangerous looks from here,” said Mary Dillon, as they were about to turn up the glen. “Don’t you often feel as if we were two forlorn maidens—I mean,” she cried merrily, “a forlorn maiden and a half—shut up in that terrible place waiting for a gallant knight and a half to come and rescue us from the clutches of ogre-like Uncle Gartram?”