On the upper floors boys in their sabots had perched themselves on the window-sills with legs hanging out, or were trying the mattresses still left on their wooden bedsteads. Gradually as the late February day dispersed the fog, and it was drifted by the wind in heavy masses over the woods, vehicles of all descriptions--cabriolets, victorias, tilburys, closed carriages formerly graced with armorial bearings, now let out on hire, mixed with some few well-appointed turn-outs--drove into the park. These were unharnessed, the carriages standing upon the lawns, some of the horses tied to the trees with nosebags of hay; while others, their feet clogged, were left to graze where they would. A row of carts stood on the border of a neighbouring copse, their shafts raised diagonally. All round the Château was like a fair; the stables and coach-houses had been appropriated; plough horses were to be seen in the loose boxes; coachmen and stable-boys from inns, in their straw hats, gazed admiringly at the vast proportions of the stables and dependencies, or stood hypnotized before the copper appointments of the stalls, the nickel locks, the iron bars separating one from the other. "It was a fine place after all," they said to themselves. The sight of all the careful appointments seemed to give them a vague insight into the ancient splendours of the domain, while at the same time it came across them with stupefying force: how could a man have lost such a fortune? how could there be ruin, with a rental of hundreds of thousands of pounds? And, as a natural consequence, they gave the family credit for vices which had but a very small share in the disaster, for, spitting on the cemented floors, they exclaimed: "A pleasure-loving set!"