Up hill, the narrow winding road across that almost endless plain led. Sometimes the boy let the oxen stop to rest and the rising steam from their wet flanks told how hard even those sturdy beasts found the climb. Just as she was thinking that she could endure it no longer, Felice glimpsed a faint light on a plateau-like place above them. The boy gestured with his whip.
"Thar, Major," he called back cheerfully over his shoulder, "We're a- gittin' thar—"
They were through the plains at last, ascending a sharp, rocky road for the last quarter of a mile which grew still narrower but was lined with enormous bare trees that creaked and moaned in the evening wind. Felice was really very frightened.
"Now that's luck," cried the boy cheerily, looking back at her. He was pointing with his crude whip. It was quite dark now save for a faint light below the horizon of the sand dunes, but over her shoulder as she looked where he gestured Felice saw the thin crescent of the new moon.
When she looked ahead again she could glimpse the dark outlines of the great stone house. It looked cold and formidable. It was set far back from the rising road, a long way back from the massive gate posts beside the tiny gate house where flickering lights burned on the sills of three little mullioned windows. They drove through the gates, across the flagstone-paved drive of the stable yard and came to a slow stop under the inky shadows of the wooden gallery that was built across the front of the house. A woman was hurrying down the sagging steps, such a fat, comfortable woman that Felice unconsciously leaned toward her even before she could see the alert black eyes and the wide smiling mouth. She held a lantern high above her gray curly head. It shone upon the figure of a bent old man, who stood, his cap in his hands, at the foot of the steps. He was weeping. His voice was throaty with suppressed sobs and Felice couldn't understand at all what he said because he cried out in French when he saw the Major. But she could understand the welcome cheer of the fat woman's greeting as she called,
"It's all ready—supper and all—just as though it were twenty years ago, Monsieur! Ah—" sympathy rang in her voice as the Major helped Felice descend, "I did not know—she is—lame—" Her lantern was on the ground now, her sturdy arm had encircled the slender figure in the coat, "Margot will help—so—"
And that was the way that Felice went into the House in the Woods. That was the way she entered the broad and draughty hall, with the formidably big rooms on either side dimly lighted by the queer candle lamps and the faint glow from the fires on the chilly marble hearths.
A table was set before the fire in the dining salon. It looked dismayingly long, with its deep lace cover and the branched candelabra. The very height of the carved chairs that were placed at either end seemed appalling.
But when Felice was seated in one of them, with her coat still huddled about her, she looked around with artless curiosity, and watched as in a dream, while the Major put his hand on Margot's sturdy shoulder.
"You've kept it well—" was all he said. But when he had dropped his hand Margot was wiping her eyes on her apron.