e he took a wrong turn and found himself engaged in some
overgrown woodland track; but he soon regained the high-road, and his
servant, a young fellow of indomitable cheerfulness, took the edge off
their solitude by frequent snatches of song. At length the moon rose,
and toward midnight Odo, spurring out of a dark glen, found himself at
the opening of the valley of Donnaz. A cold radiance bathed the familiar
pastures, the houses of the village along the stream, and the turrets
and crenellations of the castle at the head of the gorge. The air was
bitter, and the horses' hoofs struck sharply on the road as they trotted
past the slumbering houses and halted at the gateway through which Odo
had first been carried as a sleepy child. It was long before the
travellers' knock was answered, but a bewildered porter at length
admitted them, and Odo cried out when he recognised in the man's face
the features of one of the lads who had taught him to play pallone in
the castle court.

Within doors all were abed; but the cavaliere was expected, and supper
laid for him in the very chamber where he had slept as a lad. The sight
of so much that was strange and yet familiar--of the old stone walls,
the banners, the flaring lamps and worn slippery stairs--all so much
barer, smaller, more dilapidated than he had remembered--stirred the
deep springs of his piety for inanimate things, and he was seized with a
fancy to snatch up a light and explore the recesses of the castle. But
he had been in the saddle since dawn, and the keen air and the long
hours of riding were in his blood. They weighted his lids, relaxed his
limbs, and gently divesting him of his hopes and fears, pressed him down
in the deep sepulchre of a dreamless sleep...

Odo remained a month at Donnaz. His grandfather's happiness in his
presence would in itself have sufficed to detain him, apart from his
natural tenderness for old scenes and associations. It was one of the
compensations of his rapidly travelling imagination that the past, from
each new vantage-ground of sensation, acquired a fascination which to
the more sober-footed fancy only the perspective of years can give.
Life, in childhood, is a picture-book of which the text is
undecipherable; and the youth now revisiting the unchanged setting of
his boyhood was spelling out for the first time the legend beneath the
picture.

The old Marquess, though broken in body, still ruled his household from
his seat beside the he