“Would we ever!” replied both the younger and older Americans almost in unison.

“Then we’ll take you all around it!” rejoined Sabina enthusiastically. “You may have larger forests, Matthew, but we Europeans have larger houses! Can we, Papa?”

“By all means. It will be the perfect exercise to stimulate body and mind after lunch.”

“After that ride this morning, I don’t think my body will need any exercise,” said Matthew. “But why our minds? How will they be stimulated?”

“Why, in keeping us from getting lost, my boy!” answered the baron. “This is no ordinary house. There are turns and twists and passageways and secret chambers and false walls and hidden staircases innumerable!”

“And dungeons!” put in Sabina.

“Only in old Eppie’s fantasies,” rejoined her father.

“Who’s old Eppie?” Matthew asked.

“Our oldest servant,” replied the baron. “She is what I believe you Americans would call ‘retired’ now. She’s eighty-five if she’s a day, though no one knows her age for certain, and she certainly doesn’t want to think of herself as retired.”

“She’s still here? You still take care of her?”

“Certainly. She’s part of our family. She served my father before me, and her mother served my grandfather.”

“She was born in the middle of the nineteenth century,” added Marion. “Germany was not even a nation then. She is from a different time, there is no doubt about that.”

“You’ll excuse me from the tour, won’t you, dear?” said Marion. “I need to tend to the kitchen.”

The baron kissed his wife, then led the way from the dining room, located on the ground floor, almost in the middle of the west wing of the house, just off the kitchen. He continued through the adjoining parlor and turned left into the wide corridor on its opposite side, arriving at length at the wide entry just inside the main front doors.

“This is the proper place to begin,” he said. “There are four separate stairways connecting the three floors—”

“Six, Papa,” said Sabina.

“I was saving the other two for a surprise,” said the baron with a smile. “Let me say there are four known stairways, and two that are, shall we say—well, you shall see!”

He turned and led them up the great, wide, circular oak staircase, which made the single round of a giant corkscrew in arriving at the next level up, or the first floor. There he paused.