“What a long time before you had to come here again.” She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. “It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!”
“I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.”
“I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit it!”
I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
“It never goes out, day or night,” she said, as though explaining. “In case any one comes in with cold toes, you see.”
“It’s even lovelier inside than it was out,” I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves. “Yes, it must be beautiful,” she said. “Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.”
I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
“Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.” She swung a light door inward.
“By the way, where are they?” I asked. “I haven’t even heard them to-day.”
She did not answer at once. Then, “I can only hear them,” she replied softly. “This is one of their rooms—everything ready, you see.”