And so to Maryhouse, not even a telegram having been sent ahead of her. She knew her dear friends, the owners of the place, were still abroad. But there was always Mistress Dumphie, the old, old lady-housekeeper, who had been born and reared and wooed and married, too, at Maryhouse. Mistress Dumphie would take her in for a night, and if not—there was an inn in the ugly little weaving village. The great limousine rolled through the gates of the smaller avenue and over the bridge of the Arbalestiers Tower, and stopped before the great, rusty crowned gates of the sunny courtyard.
The larks were singing. The Quhair brook ran under the hazel-banks. Oh! what sweet quiet after the roar of Paris and London and the dust of the roads.
The rusty chain was pulled, the great bell clanged on the side of a pepper-box turret ever so high overhead. Mistress Dumphie, in her morn’s merino and black net cap, appeared behind the rusty grille.
“Guid preserve ’s a’! It’s the young lord’s leddy!� she said.
The “young lord’s leddy� came in. She was to stay. The chauffeur went back to the hotel.
“I feel as though I should find something here,� said the “young lord’s leddy,� “something that I have lost somehow. It is very odd!�
She wandered about the beautiful old house all the rest of the day.
“Here is the great oak window-seat where we used to sit together. Here is the little stone parlor where we quarreled and made it up. Here is the vast tapestried chamber, with the faded Stuart portraits on the walls, that was my bedroom; and this smaller room, with the acorn-shaped stone mullions and the ebony and tulip wood furniture, was his!�
What fine days they had spent in those daisied avenues, under those huge oaks. What wet ones under the old painted, diapered ceilings. The wettest of all they had spent in looking for the Lost Room.
The Lost Room was a chamber that everybody knew of, but nobody ever discovered. Counting from outside, you could be sure there was an extra window, but go where you would about the hushed mysterious house, you never opened a door that led into the Lost Room.