"Well, my lady, it may seem queer, but you'll see what I mean."
Lady Alice tossed her stately head.
"Any commands in particular, please, my lady, before you leave?" inquired Donica, with one of her dry little courtesies.
"No; and I must go. Just hand this pillow and bag to the man; and I suppose you wish your respects to Miss Beatrix?"
To all which, in her own way, Donica Gwynn assented; and the old lady, assisted by her footman, got into the carriage, and nodded a pale and silent farewell to her housekeeper; and away drove the old carriage at a brisk pace toward Marlowe Manor.
CHAPTER XIX.
Lady Alice takes Possession.
What to the young would seem an age; what, even in the arithmetic of the old, counts for something, about seventeen years had glided into the eternal past since last Lady Alice had beheld the antique front and noble timber of Marlowe Manor; and memory was busy with her heart, and sweet and bitter fancies revisiting her old brain, as her saddened eyes gazed on that fair picture of the past. Old faces gone, old times changed, and she, too, but the shadow of her former self, soon, like those whom she remembered there, to vanish quite, and be missed by no one.
"Where is Miss Beatrix?" inquired the old lady, as she set her long slim foot upon the oak flooring of the hall. "I'll rest a moment here." And she sat down upon a carved bench, and looked with sad and dreaming eyes through the open door upon the autumnal landscape flushed with the setting sun, the season and the hour harmonising regretfully with her thoughts.