And of her inmost self she asked this question:
"Suppose I have made a mistake? Suppose all this means nothing at all? Yes: in the little leather bag I have in my pocket, there is a medal, and on it the name of a château, and a given day in a given year. And here I am at the château at the appointed time; but all the same what is there to prove that my reasoning is sound, or that anything is going to happen? A hundred and fifty or two hundred years is a very long time, and any number of things may have happened to sweep away the combinations of which I believe I have caught a glimpse."
She rose. Step by step she advanced slowly. A pavement of different-colored bricks, arranged in a design, covered the ground. The arch of an isolated gateway, quite bare, opened high above. She passed through it, and at once, at the end of a large court-yard, she saw—and it was all she did see—the face of a clock.
A glance at her watch showed her that it was half-past eleven. There was no one else in the ruins.
And truly it seemed as if there never could be any one else in this last corner of the world, whither chance could only bring ignorant wayfarers or shepherds in quest of pasturage for their flocks. Indeed, there were only fragments of ruins, rather than actual ruins, covered with ivy and briers—here a porch, there a vault, further on a chimney-piece, further still the skeleton of a summer-house—alone, venerable witnesses to a time at which there had been a house, with a court-yard in front, wings on both sides, surrounded by a park. Further off there stood, in groups or in fragments of avenues, fine old trees, chiefly oaks, wide-spreading, venerable, and majestic.
At one side of the court-yard, the shape of which she could make out by the position of the buildings which had crumbled to ruins, part of the front, still intact, and backed by a small hill of ruins, held, at the top of a very low first story, this clock which had escaped by a miracle man's ravages. Across its face stretched its two big hands, the color of rust. Most of the hours, engraved contrary to the usual custom in Roman figures, were effaced. Moss and wall-pellitory were growing between the gaping stones of the face. Right at the bottom of it, under cover in a small niche, a bell awaited the stroke of the hammer.
A dead clock, whose heart had ceased to beat. Dorothy had the impression that time had stopped there for centuries, suspended from these motionless hands, from that hammer which no longer struck, from that silent bell in its sheltering niche. Then she espied underneath it, on a marble tablet, some scarcely legible letters, and mounting a pile of stones, she could decipher the words: In robore fortuna!
In robore fortuna! The beautiful and noble motto that one found everywhere, at Roborey, at the Manor, at the Château de la Roche-Périac, and on the medal! Was Dorothy right then? Were the instructions given by the medal still valid? And was it truly a meeting-place to which one was summoned, across time and space, in front of this dead clock?
She gained control of herself and said, laughing:
"A meeting-place to which I alone shall come."