Delightful as the new boudoir might be, they dawdled in the picture gallery, that long corridor on which all the upper rooms opened, and at one end of which was the door of Lady Maulevrier's bedroom, at right angles with that red-cloth door, which was never opened, except to give egress or ingress to James Steadman, who kept the key of it, as if the old part of Fellside House had been an enchanted castle. Lord Hartfield had not forgotten that summer midnight last year, when his meditations were disturbed by a woman's piercing cry. He thought of it this evening, as Mary and he lowered their voices on drawing near Lady Maulevrier's door. She was asleep within there now, perhaps, that strange old woman; and at any moment an awful shriek, as of a soul in mortal agony, might startle them in the midst of their bliss.
The lamps were lighted below; but this upper part of the house was wrapped in the dull grey twilight of a stormy evening. A single lamp burned dimly at the further end of the corridor, and all the rest was shadow.
Mary and her husband walked up and down, talking in subdued tones. He was explaining the necessity of his being in London next week, and promising to come back to Fellside directly his business at the House was over.
'It will be delightful to read your speeches,' said Mary; 'but I am silly and selfish enough to wish you were a country squire, with no business in London. And yet I don't wish that either, for I am intensely proud of you.'
'And some day, before we are much older, you will sit in your robes in the peeress's gallery.'
'Oh, I couldn't,' cried Mary. 'I should make a fool of myself, somehow. I should look like a housemaid in borrowed plumes. Remember, I have no Anstand—I have been told so all my life.'
'You will be one of the prettiest peeresses who ever sat in that gallery, and the purest, and truest, and dearest,' protested her lover-husband.
'Oh, if I am good enough for you, I am satisfied. I married you, and not the House of Lords. But I am afraid your friends will all say, "Hartfield, why in heaven's name did you marry that uncultivated person?" Look!'
She stopped suddenly, with her hand on her husband's arm. It was growing momentarily darker in the corridor. They were at the end near the lamp, and that other end by Lady Maulevrier's door was in deeper darkness, yet not too dark for Lord Hartfield to see what it was to which Mary pointed.
The red-cloth door was open, and a faint glimmer of light showed within. A man was standing in the corridor, a small, shrunken figure, bent and old.