No poet has written such lovely things as Time had written here in those three lovely books--the rose garden, the sunk garden, and the Dutch garden of Saluce; books whose leaves in summer were ever being turned over by the idle fingers of the wind. Years of desolation had completed their charm, just as years of death the charm of some vanished poet's works. Peopled with ghosts and flowers, voices of fountains and voices of birds, walking there alone on a summer's day one would scarcely have dared to call out, lest some silvery voice made answer, or some white hand from amidst the rose-bushes, some hand once whiter than the white rose, some voice once sweeter than the voices of the birds. "And Marianne de l'Orme, how is she--the Austrian, and she whom they call the Flower of Light? Diane de Christeuil, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, Aloise de Gondalaurier, sweet-named ghosts: where are ye?" "Who knows?" would reply the breeze in the rose-bushes. "They are here, they are here," the birds in the trees. Here had walked, in times long past, the ladies of the house of Saluce. This family, from which I drew half my being, had for me a charm and mystery beyond expression. I was a Mahon, all my traditions were Irish; yet I was linked with this family, of whom all were dead, this family whose stately history went back into the remote past. I had never seen my mother; I had never seen a living Saluce; they were all vanished. Nothing remained but their pictures and their names, yet I had come from them in part. They were my ancestors, and my likeness had walked the earth, in the form of Philippe de Saluce, over two hundred years before I was born; and my likeness in the form of Philippe de Saluce had---- We know what he had done. The doors of the château were open, and some workmen were busy in the hall, repairing the oakwork. They were talking and laughing, and their voices had set the echo chattering in the gallery above. Marianne seemed mocking them; and as I gave them good-day and examined their work her voice seemed mocking mine. Then I left the men, and came upstairs to look at the place once again. I passed from corridor to corridor, and at last found the turret-room whither I had come that day with Eloise. It was just the same, everything in exactly the same place, even to the books on the table. I examined them: some were quite modern, drawings by Gavarni and De Musset's poems; some were more antique. Amongst them was a work in gilded boards, the history of the Saluce family, written by one Armand de Saluce, in the year 1820, and dedicated rather fulsomely to the then head of the house. He was some poor relation evidently, Armand, and his language was very flowery; and from his little book one might have imagined the Saluces a family of saints and lambs. I turned the pages this way and that, till I found what he had to say about Philippe. Philippe de Saluce, according to Armand, had died in consequence of an unfortunate love-affair.