“What was the matter with you early this morning, Kemball?” inquired my host presently with a laugh.
“You woke me up suddenly, and I believed that you were unwell!”
“No,” I said. “On the contrary, I was awake, and I heard you sigh and groan, therefore I believed you were ill.”
“You were awake?” he echoed, regarding me sharply through his dark spectacles. “Then—then I must have had the nightmare or something, eh?”
“Probably you had,” I said. Then I added, “I didn’t pass a very good-night myself.”
“I hate sleeping in strange beds,” Asta declared.
“One has to get used to them on a motor-tour,” remarked Shaw, leaning back again, his face set straight before him.
I was half inclined to relate my weird experience, yet I felt that if I did Asta might only regard me as a frightened fool.
Therefore the subject dropped when next moment, as the road ran over the hillside, we burst forth into admiration of the wide and magnificent panorama with a splendid old château with numberless round-slated turrets, perched upon a huge rock rising from the valley in the foreground—a huge, mediaeval fortress, yet still inhabited. Below clustered the sloping roofs of a small village within the ponderous walls of the château, entrance to which was by two ancient gates, with guard-houses built above them—a place which long ago had been the stronghold of one of the robber-barons of the Yonne.
Truly the Lyons road is full of variety and picturesqueness, running, as it does, through those rich vinelands and mountains of the Côte d’Or, before descending to the valley where the broad Saone flows south to join the mighty Rhone.