He put out his hand and pressed hers, but without cordiality. The hand he took was that of the daughter of the scourge of the country. He could not forget that; he touched the hand of the child of the man who had brought desolation into the home of the Rossignols. Noémi left the attendants with her horse at the foot of the steep ascent that led to the Church of Guillem. The ascent was up a slope of crumbled chalk and flints hardly held together by a little wiry grass, some straggling pinks, and bushes of box and juniper. The incline was as rapid as that of a Gothic house-roof. Of path there was none, for every man who scrambled up mounted his own way, and his footprints sent shale and dust over the footprints of his predecessor. The plateau through which the river has sawn its way is some four hundred feet at the highest point above the bed of the stream; in some places the cliffs are not only perpendicular, they overhang. They rise at once from the river that washes their bases and undermines them, or from the alluvial flats that have been formed by floods. This was not the case at L'Eglise Guillem. The stronghold of Guillem occupied a terrace in the abrupt scarp where it rose out of an immense slope of rubble, very much as at Ste. Soure, a little below it on the further bank. Here, as there, the rubble slope was a protection as great as a precipice. It was not as difficult to climb, but it could not be climbed without those in the stronghold being able to roll down rocks, discharge weapons at such as were laboriously endeavouring to mount. Noémi reached a spring that issued from the side of the cliff in a dribble, was received in a basin, and the overflow nourished a dense growth of maidenhair-fern and moss. It was thence that the occupants of the castle derived their drinking-water. Hard by was the gateway. Here she was challenged, gave her name, and was admitted. L'Eglise Guillem was oddly constructed. The depth of the caves or concave shelters was not great, not above twelve to fifteen feet, consequently would not admit of chambers and halls in which many men could move about. To gain space, beams had been driven into the natural wall of rock at the back of the caves, and brought forward to project some eight feet over the edge of the cliff. On these projecting rafters walls of timber filled in with stone had been erected, and lean-to roofs added to cover them, socketed into the cliff above the opening mouth of the cave or series of caves. This is still a method of construction in the country, with this exception--that such modern dwellings are not pendulous in mid-air, as were those of the free captains, but are now on solid floors, and consist of rooms, one half of which are caves, and the other half artificial excrescences.