Nevertheless, when the carriage that brought her from the station entered, at nightfall, among the wooded hills, in the gloomy avenue that led up to the chateau, she felt an impression as of cold.
"Mon Dieu! my dear," she said, laughingly, "your chateau is a perfect castle of Udolpho!" Lucan excused his chateau as best he could, and protested, moreover, that he was ready to leave it the very next day, if she were not better pleased with its appearance after sunrise.
It was not long before she became passionately fond of it.

Her happiness, hitherto so constrained, blossomed freely for the first time in that solitude, and shed upon it a charming light.

She even expressed the wish of spending the winter and waiting there for Julia, who was to return to France in the course of the following year.

Lucan offered some slight opposition to that project, which appeared to him rather over-heroic for a Parisian, but ended by adopting it, too happy himself to harbor the romance of his love in that romantic spot.

He began, however, taxing his ingenuity to attenuate what there might be too austere in that abode, by opening relations with some of the neighbors for Clotilde's benefit, and by procuring her, at intervals, her mother's society.