“I'll take the keb round to the stable-yard, miss; it'll be more convenient-like for the luggage,” added the man, with a mildly disapproving glance towards the narrow tiled path leading from the gate to the house-door.
Sara nodded, and, having paid him his fare, made her way through the white gateway and along the path.
There seemed a curious absence of life about the place. No sound of voices broke the silence, and, although the front door stood invitingly open, there was no sign of any one hovering in the background ready to receive her.
Vaguely chilled—since, of course, they must be expecting her—she rang the bell. It clanged noisily through the house but failed to produce any more important result than the dislodging of some dust from a ledge above which the bell-wire ran. Sara watched it fall and lie on the floor in a little patch of fine, greyish powder.
The hall, of which the open door gave view, though of considerable dimensions, was poorly furnished. The wide expanse of colour-washed wall was broken only by a hat-stand, on which hung a large assortment of masculine hats and coats, all of them looking considerably the worse for wear, and by two straight-backed chairs placed with praiseworthy exactitude at equal distances apart from the aforesaid rather overburdened piece of furniture. The floor was covered with linoleum of which the black and white chess-board pattern had long since retrogressed with usage into an uninspiring blur. A couple of threadbare rugs completed a somewhat depressing “interior.”
Sara rang the bell a second time, on this occasion with an irritable force that produced clangour enough, one would have thought, to awaken the dead. It served, at all events, to arouse the living, for presently heavy footsteps could be heard descending the stairs, and, finally, a middle-aged maidservant, whose cap had obviously been assumed in haste, appeared, confronting Sara with an air of suspicion that seemed rather to suggest that she might have come after the spoons.
“The doctor's out,” she announced somewhat truculently. Then, before Sara had time to formulate any reply, she added, a thought more graciously: “Maybe you're a stranger to these parts. Surgery hour's not till six o'clock.”
She was evidently fully prepared for Sara to accept this as a dismissal, and looked considerably astonished when the latter queried meekly:
“Then can I see Miss Selwyn, please? I understand Mrs. Selwyn is an invalid.”
“You're right there. The mistress isn't up for seeing visitors. And Miss Molly, she's not home—she's away to Oldhampton.”