But before she could say more, Celia appeared in the doorway.
“You lazy people!” she said, “everybody’s asking for you. We are going to have a dance in the hall before we go to bed.”
Chapter Ten.
Dreams and no Dreams.
Miss Norreys’s mind, though a remarkably well-balanced one, was yet far from phlegmatic or unimpressionable. So far, indeed, from such did she know her inner self to be, that she had learned by experience to beware of her own natural impulsiveness, to have profound belief in “second thoughts.”
But she was full of quick sympathy, and ever ready to feel keen interest in her surroundings. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that on the night following the day we have been describing, she went up to her own room greatly engrossed by all she had heard, anxiously eager to prove herself a friend worthy of the name to the various members of the Maryon family who had appealed to her for assistance or advice. It was a beautiful night. Before Hertha got into bed she drew back the curtains of one of the two windows—her room was a corner one—as was her custom. For she loved the early morning light, and it never disturbed her slumbers before her usual hour for waking.
A flood of moonlight lay on the terrace beneath. The night was perfectly, peculiarly still, and not a leaf seemed to flutter. There was something curiously dream-like about the whole scene—for the room in which Hertha stood, and on which she threw a glance as she turned again, was, like most of those in the old house, quaint and picturesque in its very simplicity. White-panelled and wainscoted, with little wreaths of carved flowers above the lintel of the door and over the two old mirrors sunk in the walls; the bed in a sort of alcove; the ancient fireplace, surmounted by a very high and narrow carved and moulded mantel-piece, of the same dull, matt, white-painted wood, which was the chief characteristic of the house, the whole effect was like nothing that Miss Norreys remembered ever to have seen.
“It is very un-English, very un-nineteenth-century, very unlike all the attempted reproductions of the past we have so many of,” thought. Hertha. “It is so exactly what it may have been, and probably was, three or four hundred years ago. One can realise how the family life has gone on unbrokenly, with all the changing actors in it, generation after generation.”