Her mental equipment was bewildering: the erudition of an Oxford don spiced with more than a dash of Boul’ Mich’, which made for complexity. Her curious learning was doubtless due to the setting of a receptive mind amid such environment, but how she had retained her piquant vivacity in Hollow Grange was less comprehensible. The servants formed a small and saturnine company, only two—the housekeeper, Mrs. Harman, a black and forbidding figure, and Madame Charny, a French companion—sleeping in the house. Gawly, a surly creature who neglected the gardens and muttered savagely over other duties, together with his wife, who cooked, resided at the lodge. There were two maids, who lived in the village....
The glow from the distant fire seemed to be reflected upon the firs bordering the terrace below; then Dillon, watching the dull, red light, remembered that Dr. Kassimere’s laboratory adjoined the tiny chapel, and that, though midnight drew near, the doctor was still at work there.
Owls and other night birds hooted and shrieked among the trees and many bats were in flight. He found himself thinking of the pyramid bats of Egypt, and of the ibis-headed Thoth who was the scribe of the under-world.
Dr. Kassimere had made himself medically responsible for his case, and had read attentively the letters which Dillon had brought from his own physician. He was to prescribe on the following day, and to-night the visitor found Morpheus a treacherous god. Furtive activities disturbed the house, or so it seemed to the sleepless man tossing on his bed; alert intelligences within Hollow Grange responded to the night-life of the owls without, and he seemed to lie in the shadow of a watchfulness that never slumbered.
III
“There’s many a fine walk hereabouts,” said the old man seated in the arm-chair in the corner of the Threshers’ Inn bar-parlour.
Dillon nodded encouragingly.
“There’s Ganton-on-the-Hill,” continued the ancient. “You can see the sea from there in clear weather; and many’s the time I’ve heard the guns in France from Upper Crobury of a still night. Then, four mile away, there’s the haunted Grange, though nobody’s allowed past the gate. Not as nobody wants to be,” he added, reflectively.
“The haunted Grange?” questioned Dillon. “Where is that?”
“Hollow Grange?” said the old man. “Why, it lies——”