“Did you see him?” I said excitedly. “I believe he knew us!”
“Of course he did,” returned my cousin, with an offensive coolness that was intended to carry off any recollections of her dastardly moment of panic, “but he won’t tell. He knows if he gives us away about the revolver we will inform about the cow. For my part I’m rather sorry he isn’t here now,” she went on, as she wiped a knife in the grass, and then stabbed it
“WE HEARD WHEELS CLOSE AT HAND.”
into the earth to give it a polish; “no picnic should be without a dog. When I was a child we used always to wipe the knives on the dogs’ backs between the courses at a picnic, and then the dogs used to try and lick that spot on their backs——”
I am not squeamish, but I checked my cousin’s recital at this point, and we pursued our way to the house. Tall sliding doors, in perfect order, admitted us to a large quiet yard, so orderly that, as we looked round it, we felt, like Hans Andersen’s black beetle, quite faint at the sight of so much cleanliness, and would have been revived by the only familiar whiff of the cow-shed and pigstye. We gave Sibbie and her luncheon bag to a man who was hanging about, and were proceeding to ask whether we might walk about the grounds, when a door into the house opened, and there issued from it a young woman of such colossal height and figure that we stared at her awe-struck. She smiled at us with all the benevolence of the giantess, and advancing, offered to be our guide. We thanked her like Sunday School children and followed her meekly towards the hall door, feeling as we looked at her that it would have been simpler to have climbed on to her tremendous shoulders and got at once a bird’s-eye view of the demesne. It was apparently part of the programme that we should see the inside of the house, and she led us through the rooms in the lower story, billiard-room, dining-room, drawing-room, library; all comfortable, and in their way imposing, but unfortunately devoid of special objects to comment on, while the giantess stood and held the door of each open, with, as it seemed to us, an ogress-like avidity for approbation. But she proved to be a kindly giantess, and when we looked, in spite of ourselves, a little unenthusiastic at the prospect of viewing the upper part of the house she relented and said we might go out into the grounds.
The hill sloped steeply from the dining-room windows, to the lake in front, and to a wood at the side, and going down some steps we found ourselves in a shady walk by the water.