It was raining harder now, and Dorothy could see nothing beyond the path of their headlights. Although she had never been in the grounds before, she had driven past the Winn place numbers of times. Finally, she made out the bulk of a great stone house. Martin Lawson stopped the car beneath a porte-cochere. They had arrived.
Massive doors of wrought iron and glass swung open. A butler and two footmen in livery ran down the steps. The butler, a tall, important-looking individual, snapped open the car door.
“Good evening, Mr. Lawson,” he said. “Good evening, Miss.”
The voice with its high-pitched Oxford drawl still smacked of Whitechapel. Dorothy, who had travelled in England, was sure that under stress, the cockney in this personage would come out. She knew he was careful of his aitches.
“Good evening, Tunbridge,” Lawson returned briskly, and Dorothy smiled pleasantly. “Is Mrs. Lawson still up?”
“Madam is awaiting you in the library, sir.” Tunbridge helped Dorothy to alight and handed Janet’s overnight bag to a footman. “Jones,” he said to the other flunky, as Lawson stepped out of the car, “drive round to the service entrance. Miss Jordan’s box is in the back of the car. See that it is taken up to the Pink Bedroom and have Hanley garage the motor-car.”
“Very good, sir,” returned the man, and he got into the automobile.
Tunbridge ushered them up the broad stone steps. Dorothy caught a last glimpse of a leafless, dripping hedge across the drive, and the giant skeleton arms of a tree that seemed to menace earth and sky; then she entered the house, wondering what the next act of this strange drama would bring forth.
She found herself in an enormous hall, furnished with objects such as she had never seen outside a museum. Elaborately carved oak, suits of armor, stone urns, portraits, a wide stone staircase mounting upward to surrounding galleries, stained glass windows, tigers’ and lions’ heads, antlers of tremendous size, strange and beautiful weapons, all ranged in confusion before her eyes and suggested a baronial castle rather than the home of an American scientist, in the Connecticut hills.
Tunbridge led to a door on the right, where he knocked, then opened, as a muffled “Come in” was heard.