I thought over all that had happened in the last few months. I thought of St. Jean lying lonely and forsaken with the bright moonlight shining on the graves and making colored shadows on the floor of the church. I thought too with a shudder of the awful caverns under ground and the dark and dreadful waters which had swallowed up the young heir of Crequi and where I had been so near to losing my own life.
I grew restless and nervous and began to fancy that I heard stealthy steps and whispering voices outside the door. At last I made a desperate effort to withdraw my attention from these sounds. I repeated all the Psalms with which I was familiar in French, English, and Latin, and then tried to imagine myself helping Sister Baptista to measure olives—a fancy which soon put me to sleep.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
LIFE AT THE HALL.
JENNY came to call us betimes in the morning, but we could hardly dress in time for breakfast, so occupied were we in gazing from our projecting window at the great picture spread out before us.
The morning was clear and frosty. The house, as I have said, stood very high on the hillside, and the ground was so steep that there was nothing to break the view over the broad plains, clothed here and there with little villages, farm-houses, and clumps of wood. A great deal of the land was pasture and still more was unclaimed waste, inhabited only by gypsies and other wild and lawless people. We seemed to look directly down into Highbeck village on one side, and on the other up the course of the noisy mountain stream to the place where it tumbled over a dam or ledge of rocks forming a considerable cataract. The woods were all brown and sere save where the red stems and dusky green heads of the Scotch furs mixed with the oaks and ashes, and the rowan trees still displayed their scarlet berries.
"Is it not beautiful!" said Amabel. "There is something exhilarating in such a wide prospect. It makes me think of our favorite window at St. Jean, only one cannot see the sea as we could there."
"What a large house it is!" said I. "I thought we were quite at the end of the passage, but see, there is a long range of wall beyond us. What beautiful ivy!"
"Half the house cannot be inhabited!" remarked Amabel. "But come, we must make haste or we shall not be ready."