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 hearth.  The failure of bodily activity seemed to have doubled his moral vigour, and the walls shook with the vehemence of his commands.  The Marchioness was sunk in a state of placid apathy from which only her husband’s outbursts roused her; one of the canonesses was dead, and the other, drier and more shrivelled than ever, pined in her corner like a statue whose mate is broken.  Bruno was dead too; his old dog’s bones had long since enriched a corner of the vineyard; and some of the younger lads that Odo had known about the place were grown to sober-faced men with wives and children.

Don Gervaso was still chaplain of Donnaz; and Odo saw with surprise that the grave ecclesiastic who had formerly seemed an old man to him was in fact scarce past the middle age.  In general aspect he was unchanged; but his countenance had darkened, and what Odo had once taken for harshness of manner he now perceived to be a natural melancholy.  The young man had not been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world of crystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious of the new forces abroad.  It had never occurred to the Marquess that anything short of a cataclysm such as it would be blasphemy to predict could change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lord took tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops.  The hierarchy which rested on the bowed back of the toiling serf and culminated in the figure of the heaven-sent King seemed to him