Isabel shook her head.
“Oh, no,” she replied, “I have never seen one of the family except in church.”
“I am longing for Sunday,” I said. For though I had already been more than a week at Millflowers, I had not yet been to the village church, as on my first Sunday there we had driven some miles in a different direction, by Mr Wynyard’s wish, to hear a noted preacher who happened to be visiting in that neighbourhood.
We were standing just then, Isabel and I, on the rising ground I have spoken of, and my eyes were fixed on Grimsthorpe.
“No,” I went on, “I have never seen anything so strange. It might be an enchanted—not ‘palace,’ it is too ugly for that. I don’t know what to call it. We have stood here some minutes, and there has not been the very slightest sign of life to be seen or heard. Not even a dog barking. How do they manage to make even their servants as noiseless and invisible as themselves?”
“You are drawing on your imagination a little,” said Isabel, smiling. “There is a gardener mowing the grass in that corner. See!” and she pointed it out, “and—yes! there is the baker’s cart driving up the back entrance.”
I was almost disappointed by her matter-of-factness.
“You are so desperately unromantic,” I said impatiently. “You needn’t have pointed out the gardener and the baker!” And in my own mind I thought that I would keep my curiosity more to myself in the future. “I don’t believe Isabel would at all sympathise in any plan for getting to know these people!” but in this I did her injustice.
That very evening, just as it was beginning to get dusk, Isabel was called away by her father, as not infrequently happened, to do some writing for him. I was not inclined to stay indoors, so I ran upstairs to fetch my outdoor things, telling Isabel as I went, that I was going for a stroll on my own account, to pass the time that she was with her father.
Scarcely conscious of any intention of the kind, I turned nevertheless in the direction of the mysterious house. It was too late to have climbed up the hilly road referred to; besides, the fading light would have made it impossible to distinguish anything. So I contented myself with skirting the high wall of the grounds on the side nearer the Manor-house. I had walked about three-quarters of a mile, and was beginning to think it was time to return, when, standing still for a moment in consideration, I heard, in the perfect silence which seemed to pervade the locality, the sound of approaching footsteps. I glanced round, but no one was to be seen on the road, and as the steps drew nearer and more distinct, I became aware that they were those of some one on the inner side of the wall. I stood listening more and more intently, when, to my surprise and almost alarm, a figure appeared before me on the path, several yards beyond the spot I had reached. It was that of a person who had emerged from within; the fact being, though I was not then aware of it, that there was a door in the wall a little farther on.