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hall to the outer door. Master John, all bows and smiles, scurried after him; and when Kate turned her head again, the young man had disappeared.
    Nobody else seemed to think that what had happened was in the least out of the ordinary. Humphrey and the other serving man were already clearing away the dishes on the table, and old Dorothy came pattering up to her again to ask her if she would care to look at the house before she went back to her chamber.
    Kate nodded politely. She longed instead to sit old Dorothy down on the nearest stool and start asking her questions, but it seemed a little soon to try anything of that sort. From behind the great standing screen across the lower end of the hall, she could hear what sounded like a vast range of pantries, butteries, and kitchens still clattering with plates and voices; but Dorothy, pursing up her lips, led her firmly past these interesting noises to a side door opening back into the newly constructed part of the building, where they went solemnly through one beautiful, empty room after another.
    "I did not know it was such a rich house," said Kate at last, looking about her wonderingly. They were standing in a long gallery of the kind that was becoming fashionable as the old solar chambers fell more and more out of style. The gallery was the most sumptuous she had ever seen, magnificently paneled, with one entire wall cut into a sweeping line of windows through which the sun fell dappling on polished floors and portraits and cabinets of rarities. From the windows she could see the ground below falling away sharply to the roofs and fields of a little village huddled at the foot of the hill on which the castle had been built. Beyond the village was a stretch of open land dotted with groves of trees; and beyond that, as far as the eye could reach, the greens and far misty blues of the Elvenwood, with the cliffs closing in on either side of it.
    "A rich house," she repeated, turning from the window to gaze around the gallery again. "A marvelous rich house."
    Old Dorothy seemed pleased.
    "The Wardens were ever great builders in their day and their time," she said, complacently. "My young lady's father finished this room the year after Queen Mary came to the throne." She had a high voice, and spoke with much the same curious, lilting accent as Randal. It seemed to be a peculiarity of the district. Master John, Kate remembered, had a touch of it too.
    "They were an old family?" Kate decided she had better not mention Thomas Corget's report that the Wardens were a strange folk.
    "Old?" Dorothy threw the word away from her with a contemptuous toss of her head. "Old, did you say to me? Look you here." She opened a small door in one corner of the gallery, and beckoned Kate through it onto a narrow walk that ran along the top of an ancient curtain wall, behind a battlemented parapet.
    "Do you see that yonder?" she asked her, pointing west across the courtyard.
    Kate nodded. It was the great square tower with the dark archway at the foot. The man with the handcart had gone away, and only a flight of rooks was wheeling and calling about the blackened stone.
    "Lord Richard out of Normandy set that there to be his strong place many and many a hundred years ago, when he came into this land with Duke William the Conqueror, and took the old lord's daughter for his wife," said Dorothy, through the clamor of the rooks. "And even so it was not the first strong place that ever was built on that ground — no, nor the second, for the old lord's line had been in the land for many and many a hundred years before Lord Richard drove him out. He was a fierce proud man, Lord Richard was; they say he brought a master builder all the way from France to lay that tower, and killed him when the work was over so that no one would ever make another the like of it. But the old lord's daughter was a match for him, and she taught him the way of the land, and he reared his sons according to the custom of the Gard; and