"You must go round to the side-door if you have any business here," cried a shrill, angry, quavering voice, in answer to the loud knocking of a stranger at the main entrance of Heron Dyke.
Edward Conroy--for he it was--could not at first make out where the voice came from, but when he stepped from under the portico and glanced upward, he saw a withered face protruded from one of the upper windows, and a skinny hand and arm pointing in the direction of a door which he now noticed for the first time in a corner of the right wing. For the first time, too, he saw that the grim old door at which he had been knocking looked as if it had not been opened for years, and that the knocker itself was rusty from disuse. Even the steps that led up to the portico were falling into disrepair, and through the cracks and crevices tiny tufts of grass and patches of velvety moss showed themselves here and there.
Conroy descended the steps slowly, and then turned to take another look at the grey old house, which he had never seen before to-day. The first view of it, as he crossed the bridge over the moat, had not impressed him favourably. But now that he looked at it again, the quaint formality of its lines seemed to please him better. It might have few pretensions to architectural dignity; but, with the passage of years, there had come to it a certain harmoniousness such as it had never possessed when it was new. Summer sun and winter rain had not been without their effect upon it. They had toned down the hardness of its original outlines: its coldness seemed less cold, its formality not so formal, as they must once have seemed. It was slowly mellowing in the soft, sweet air of antiquity.
He noticed, as he walked along the front of the house from the main entrance to the side-door, that the entire range of windows on the ground floor had their shutters fastened, and those of the upper floor their blinds drawn down. His heart chilled for a moment as the thought struck him that some one might perhaps be lying dead inside the house. But then he reflected that he should surely have heard such a thing spoken of at the village inn, where he had slept last night. Was it not, rather, that the house had always the same shut-up look that it wore to-day?
Conroy knocked at the side-door, a heavy door also, and was answered by the loud barking of a dog. After waiting for what seemed an intolerable time, he heard footsteps in the distance, which slowly drew nearer. The door was unbolted, and opened as far as the chain inside would permit. Through this opening peered forth the crabbed, wizened face of an old man--of a man with a pointed chin, and a long nose, and eyes that were full of suspicion and ill-humour.
"And what may be your business at Heron Dyke?" he demanded, in a harsh, querulous voice, after a look that took in the stranger from head to foot.
"Be good enough to give this card to Mr. Denison, and if he can spare two minutes----"
"He won't see any strangers without he knows their business first," interrupted the old man brusquely, as he turned the card to the light that was streaming through the open doorway into the dim corridor in which he stood, and read the name printed on it. "Never heard of you before," he added. "Maybe you are a spy--a mean, dastardly spy," he continued, after a pause, still eyeing the young man suspiciously from under his thick white eyebrows.
"A spy! No, I am not a spy. Have you any spies in these parts?"
"Lots of them."