She felt her heart pounding, throbbing, beating as it had never beat before. She hurried on and on, down the broad stone pathway to the lake and there she saw her little friend, just the same as always, the broken pitcher on her shoulder.
So while the sun rose higher and higher, Betty stood there and nodded solemnly to the little stone figure, who never nodded back. And then, turning to go back to the house before the others should know that she had come here unpermitted, she stopped suddenly and uttered a little choking cry of wonder and amazement. For from here she could see the house, a place of the living, no longer a place of the dead. She could see the curtains fluttering in the breeze at the many open windows, she could see the signs of life there, the primness and neatness of it all!
And it was all familiar, there was no strangeness to her here, she was looking at that which her eyes had seen before and yet how could it be, since she had not entered this place, since those days before the workmen had come to alter it all? How could it be? and yet it was! And then suddenly she turned and did not know why, and looked at an old stone seat that stood on the edge of the great ring about the sundial. Why had she looked at it? What had she expected to see there? What she saw was an old, old stone seat, grey and brown and green in the shadows, golden white where the sun's rays touched it.
And then, filled with wonder, filled with a strange sense of fear, she ran to the house and so back through the door which she bolted and barred after her, and up the steep stairs to her own little room and to sit on the bed with her hands clasped and her eyes staring into vacancy, a vacancy which yet seemed to hold many things, and one thing she saw very plainly, a man who was young, a man whom she knew instantly as he whom she had seen so often at his work in the old garden. But now she saw his face, and he smiled at her, a lean, strong, sunburned face, with eyes as blue as her own! How often in those strange dreams had she seen him, quaintly dressed in a suit of snuff coloured brown, toiling at his work with spade and hoe. "Allan!" she said suddenly. "Allan!" And then she uttered a cry, she hid her face in her hands and shivered suddenly, for she was conscious of a strange feeling of fear, for here was something she could not understand. "Allan!" Why had she said that name? What had put it into her mind and brought it to her lips?
CHAPTER XIX
THE DREAM MAIDEN
If Allan Homewood, Esquire, should by chance meet his wife's maid or any other servant on the stairs, or in one of the innumerable passages of the old fashioned house, it was scarcely likely that he would give more than a passing glance and more than a passing thought to the domestic. If little Betty Hanson should happen suddenly on the master of the house at a turn in the passageway, what more becoming than she should drop her eyes demurely and go on her way?
So while Allan and Betty Hanson had met perhaps a dozen times or more, neither had really seen the other.
Allan was vaguely conscious of a small trim figure, and a wealth of golden hair, which figure when he came tapping at the door of his wife's room usually flitted out by another door.
Betty took kindly to her new duties, she was intelligent, she was quick and she was very eager to be of service to her mistress. Because she was eager to learn she learned rapidly. Kathleen was a gentle mistress, who never lost her temper and saw something rather pitiful in the young girl's evident desire to please.