How was she to have known, how was I to have known, how "all right" it was for Léhon, the Château de Beaumanoir and--to-morrow? V The château stands a bare mile out of Dinan, and we had been there half a dozen times before; but Derry loved those crumbling old towers on their upstanding rock. It rises almost sheer, buttressed round with the broken works, and from the talus to the plateau on the top is a network of precipitous paths. You ascend it very much as you can, and the view that is blocked as you approach it breaks on you from the summit--first the sickening gulf of air at your feet, then the three or four miles of the southward plain, and the canalised Rance parting company with its attendant road to Tressaint, écluse after écluse, until it picks it up again towards Evran. That is when you look south. To the north, peering down through oak and beech as you might peer over the edge of a nest, are glimpses of white ribbon--the road along which you have passed. And on the level plateau in the middle, enclosed by oak and beech and lime, rubble-built but with dressed stone buttresses, stands the tiny modern Chapel of St Joseph of Consolation. Jennie and Derry waited at the top of the last zigzag for Madge and myself, and then gave us time to recover our breath. It was eleven o'clock of a Sunday morning, and Dinan's bells sounded lightly in the distance. They languished almost like human voices as, instead of quickening for the final summons, they delayed, with longer and longer intervals until, when you expected just one more sweet note, all was silence. I think that what gives that château-crowned rock its air of lightsome space is that you come to it from Dinan, where everything crowds upon you, the Porches trample you, and the people across the street go to bed practically on the sill of your window. True, from the ramparts you have sweep enough, but unless you go there very early you get a mediocre, unbroken illumination, with every shadow hidden behind the face that is turned towards you, and two tones paint all, the pale blue of the sky and the average of the lighted land. So there is little to be seen from the Château de Beaumanoir to the north. But turn your face south, and--ah! That is where the brightness lies! That flat average of greens and browns disappears, and you are looking, not at colour, but at Light itself! And yet every shadow points directly at you. All the sun that there is is on your own face--there, and graving as if on a tarnished silver plate a glittering outline round every object you see. Not a green, not a brown; all is grey; but twinkles with a silver edge every tree of Rance's valley, and fuming silver is every thread of house-smoke that ascends. That stretch of lock that is lost again towards Tressaint is a needle-flash, and you see the summer clouds only as you see the poplar-sheddings that float over the gulf in June--as if save for their edges they did not exist.