Dorothy was touched. Two centuries of chimerical hopes had bequeathed to the old Baron instructions so precise that they survived the extinction of his power to think. He had come here from a distance, in spite of terrible fatigues and super-human efforts to attain the goal, groping his way, in the dark, and accompanied by another creature, like himself, demented. And behold both of them stopped dead before a little water as before an obstacle there was no surmounting.
She said to him gently:
"Will you follow me? It's a mere nothing to go through."
He raised his head and looked at her and did not reply. The woman also was silent. Neither he nor she could understand. They were automata rather than living beings, urged on by an impulse which was outside them. They had come without knowing what they were doing; they had stopped and they would go back without knowing what they were doing.
There was no time to lose. Dorothy did not insist. She pulled up her frock and pinned it between her legs. She took off her shoes and stockings and stepped into the water which was so shallow that her knees were not wet.
When she reached the further shore the old people had not budged. With a dumfounded air they still gazed at the unforeseen obstacle. In spite of herself, with a compassionate smile, she stretched out her arms towards them. The old Baron again threw back his head. Juliet Assire was as still as a statue.
"Good-bye," said Dorothy, almost happy at their inaction and at being alone to prosecute the enterprise.
The approach to the peninsula of Périac is made very narrow by two marshes, according to the widow Amoureux reputed to be very dangerous, between which a narrow band of solid ground affords the only path. This path mounted a wooded ravine, which some faded writing on an old board described as "Bad Going" and came out to a plateau covered with gorse and heather. At the end of twenty minutes Dorothy crossed the débris of part of the old wall which ran round the château.
She slackened her pace. At every step it seemed to her that she was penetrating into a more and more mysterious region in which time had accumulated more silence and more solitude. The trees hugged one another more closely. The shade of the brushwood was so thick that no flowers grew beneath it. Who then had lived here formerly and planted these trees, some of which were of rare species and foreign origin?
The road split into three paths, goat-tracks, along which one had to walk in a stooping posture under the low branches. She chose at random the middle track of the three and passed through a series of small enclosures marked out by small walls of crumbling stone. Under heavy draperies of ivy she saw rows of buildings. She did not doubt that her goal was close at hand, and her emotion was so great that she had to sit down like a pilgrim who is about to arrive in sight of the sacred spot towards which he has been advancing ever since his earliest days.