"Great, splendid—superb!" cried Dunstan. "I've just discovered what's been the matter with me all along—this is the sort of place I should have lived in."
"Quite naturally; artists as a rule inhabit castles," remarked Chase, dryly, "though sometimes they are airy, like the stuff of which dreams are made. By George, fellows, what a spooky-looking place!"
"It is, indeed," asserted Dunstan, meditatively. "Strange that the Count de Morancourt should have left without putting his goods in storage!"
"Nothing strange about it," said Don. "I reckon the furniture vans wouldn't have lasted very long—see!" The light fell across several huge apertures in the opposite wall which told of the accuracy of the German artillery. "Must have been pretty hot around here, eh?"
"Quite so," responded Dunstan laconically.
The three walked around a massive oak table in the center of the room and then up to a huge fireplace at one end, where they halted. The ribbon of light quivered and flashed on an ancient suit of armor hanging just above and from there traveled to a great shield with the coat of arms of the De Morancourts emblazoned upon it. Higher up the head of a stag suddenly popped forth from the darkness, its glassy eyes seeming to stare down upon them with a look of wonder.
"Perhaps, in the age of the bow and arrow, some old ancestor of the count's brought him low," commented Chase.
Led by Don Hale, the ambulanciers continued their tour of inspection. Now the flash-light brought into view old tapestries of mellow and harmonious tones, or rows of ancestral portraits, many probably dating from the dim and distant past. The earliest of these, very somber in tone and much cracked, represented the De Morancourts as stern-visaged and august-looking personages who had a penchant for wearing armor and clasping heavy swords.
"I shouldn't like to have any old chaps of their type challenging me to fight a duel," laughed Dunstan. "Suppose we see what the rest of the château has to offer us."
Both footsteps and voices echoed in a most uncanny fashion, and Chase found that somehow the darkness and mystery of the great interior were producing rather creepy sensations within him. Often, to his imagination, the room became peopled with an assemblage of the great personages of the past. And then, though he knew it was quite absurd, an unpleasant, vaguely-defined fear assailed him that at any moment some one might step out of the shadows and demand the reason for their presence in those ancestral halls.