"Will you be kind enough to open the door," said Mr. Drelincourt. Sometimes he contented himself with asking a question or two at the wicket, and did not enter.
The woman nodded, and shut the wicket. Then from the bunch of keys at her waist she selected one, and with it opened the door, which was shut and relocked as soon as Mr. Drelincourt had crossed the threshold.
But at this point it may be as well to take leave of the master of Wyvern Towers for a while, and in order that the reader may have a due comprehension of what has yet to be told, make him acquainted, in as brief terms as may be, with certain particulars having reference to that person's family history, and to the relations which had existed between his father and himself.
The late Colonel Drelincourt had been twice married, and had left behind him two children--Felix, his son by his first wife, and Anna, his daughter by his second. At the time of the colonel's death the former was twenty three years old, and the latter thirteen. His second wife had predeceased him by a few years.
As a young man, Felix had serious differences with his father, whose pet project it was that his son should follow his own profession. This, however, Felix resolutely declined to do.
He had no taste whatever for soldiering; nor, on the other hand, did a political career hold out any attractions for him. He was a studious and bookishly inclined man, addicted to experimental chemistry, and with a strong liking for travel and exploration. Of sport, in the common acceptance of the term, he knew nothing and cared as little; but he had a fondness for horses, and was an intrepid rider.
The colonel, a military martinet of the old school, who held a blind obedience to one's superiors to be one of the main rules of conduct, never forgave his son's refusal to follow in the course he had prescribed for him. At his death it was found that, outside the entailed property, he had left everything he was possessed of to his daughter, to whom he had been passionately attached.
He had married her mother for love (like many another man, he had never touched even the fringe of romance till he was past his fortieth year), whereas he had married his first wife for her dowry. Thanks to certain arrangements made by his mother, Felix was in a measure independent of his father even before he became of age.
About three years prior to the colonel's death a terrible mischance befell his daughter, at that time in her tenth year.
It was Christmas week, at which season a certain amount of license is often winked at among the servants in country houses. In the dusk of afternoon, and in the gallery at the head of the stairs, Anna encountered what she took for an apparition, but which, in point of fact, was merely one of the servants dressed up in a sheet, and having her face whitened, on her way to join in some mummeries below stairs.