I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. She had this evening.
‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’
‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘My dear lady, who are coming here to-night?’
Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’
So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.
‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’