“To my room?”
“Yes, sir. Her ladyship understood you would be able to dine and sleep.”
The butler moved to the door, held it wide, and waited. There was nothing for it, but to rise and enter.
So the man who had all his life looked in from without, now stepped over the threshold and found himself within.
Feeling keenly alive and yet as if moving in a vivid dream, Luke Sparrow walked across the room, and followed the butler into the brightly-lighted hall, and up a wide staircase.
On a table in the hall stood a box of library books, addressed with a brush, in very black ink. Before he realised what he was doing he had read the name—
Lady Tintagel.
He repeated it to himself, as he mounted the stairs. It awakened memories of Camelot. He had never heard of it as a family name; but it seemed in keeping with this romance of an unexpected visit, as an expected guest.
At the top of the stairs the butler paused to say: “Her ladyship desires that you will please yourself, sir, as to whether you dress or not.”
Luke smiled. His knapsack held a clean shirt, a razor, a comb, a toothbrush, and half a dozen handkerchiefs.