When he at length knocked at her door again, Mr. Jobling was still with her. She came out between them into the narrow corridor. Slyne rubbed clear one steamy window to let her see the wintry landscape through which they were travelling at express speed. And Sallie looked out delighted, at the sleeping English countryside as its broad grass-lands and bare brown acres, coverts and coppices, hedgerows and lanes, with here and there a grange or a group of cottages, all still and silent, flashed into sight and so disappeared; until, overlooking them all from a knoll on the near bank of a broad, winding river, there loomed up a most magnificent mansion, embedded, in lordly seclusion, among many gnarled and age-old oaks, with gardens terrace on terrace about it, tall fountains among their empty flower-beds, a moss-grown sun-dial at the edge of a quiet, silver lake.
The moon was shining full on its innumerable windows, so that it seemed to be lighted up from within, although, in reality, all were shuttered and dark. Aloof and very stately it stood on that windless night, an empty palace which came and went in a few moments, wing after wing, with its stabling and courtyards, and still more gardens, all within an endless, ivy-clad encircling wall.
"What place is that?" asked Sallie in an awed tone as soon as the train had rumbled across the bridge.
"That's Justicehall, Lady Josceline,—your English country seat, and one of the finest properties in the Shires," Mr. Jobling informed her before Slyne could speak. "You'll be living there within a few weeks—and forgetting all your old friends!"
Sallie did not sleep much that night. Her brain was far too busy. She could scarcely believe that less than a week had elapsed since she had stepped ashore from the Olive Branch.
Nor could she yet reconcile herself to the fact that her new life must lie amid such scenes as those to which Jasper Slyne had so far introduced her. She had liked Monte Carlo, and Paris, and London as any girl might. The great house in Grosvenor Square she had mistaken for an hotel. But the calmly arrogant grandeur of Justicehall had merely oppressed her. And the idea that she might have to live there did not please her at all. For how could she, a creature of the free air, of sunshine and wind and sea and the world's waste places, be happy immured within that immense edifice, encircled by servants, hemmed in on every side by unaccustomed conventionalities, all as distasteful as new to her. She made up her mind, there and then, that, if she might have any say on that subject, Justicehall should stay empty.
But—would she have any say on that subject, or any other? She did not know. Jasper Slyne had so far told her only so much as he thought fit of what was before her. She lay quite still in her narrow berth, gazing out at the window whose blind she had bidden Ambrizette loose from the catch, a hundred puzzled, helpless questions thronging through her head, till the moon failed her and all was darkness but for the flashes of red or green or yellow light that swept past as the train sped through some wayside station or sleeping town.
Then she too fell asleep at last, and so forgot her difficulties till she awoke again in a new and most wonderful world; a world of gaunt, grey mountains and wide dark moors, white tumbling torrents on hillsides, in deep ravines, forests of stately fir and pine that looked like the masts of ships; a world, moreover, which seemed in some sense familiar and friendly to her.
Day was breaking and Ambrizette was already astir. She had come quietly in and closed the curtains during the night, and was now once more looping them back to let in the first of the sun. Sallie lay for a little longer watching the sunrise warm those enchanted solitudes into a golden semblance of fairy-land.
There was snow on the near mountain-tops that turned from the tint of pigeon-blood rubies to pink, from pink to amber, and so to the purest white. The train was travelling through an extensive plantation of silver birches, amid which a lordly stag, paralysed by its swift approach, stood starkly at bay with a timid hind at its heels. A myriad rabbits were diving madly into the bracken on every side. Above in the blue a belated wild-goose was winging its hasty way to some warmer clime; for there was something more than a hint of hard, black frost in the morning air.