“My chauffeur left last week, but Paul will show you the road,” he said, as the valet seated himself beside me. “Overstow is about ten miles off.”
I don’t know why it was, but that girl’s dark eyes seemed to haunt me. She was just behind me with her father, and twice when I had occasion to look round to ask Mr. Rayne some question or other, I found her gaze fixed on mine, which, foolishly I will admit, disconcerted me.
Mr. Rayne himself addressed me only once of his own accord during the drive, and that was to ask me again if I sang.
“Why the dickens does he want to know if I sing?” was my mental comment when I had replied that I sang a little, without reminding him that he had put the same question to me on the previous day. For an instant the thought flashed across me that perhaps my new employer had some kink in his brain to do with singing; and yet, I reflected, that seemed hardly likely to be the case with a man who in all other respects appeared to be so exceptionally sane.
I was still cogitating this, when the car sped round a wide curve in the road and beyond big lodge gates a large imposing mansion of modern architecture came suddenly into view about half a mile away, partly concealed by beautiful woods sloping down to it from both sides of the valley. Slackening speed as we came near the lodge, I was about to stop to let Paul alight to open the gates, beyond which stretched the long winding avenue of tall trees, when a man came running out of the lodge and made haste to throw the gates open.
My first surprise on our arrival at Overstow Hall—and I was to have many more surprises before I had been long in Mr. Rayne’s service—was at finding that though my employer had quite a large staff of servants, there was not a woman amongst them! Several guests were staying in the house, including a middle-aged lady, called Madame, whose position I could not exactly place, though she appeared to be in charge of the establishment, in charge also of Lola.
Towards ten o’clock next morning the footman came to tell me that Mr. Rayne wanted to see me at once in the library.
“He’s in one of his queer moods this morning,” the young man said, “so you had better be careful. His letters have upset him, I think.”
I thanked the lad for his hint, but on my way to the library, a room I had not yet been in, I missed my bearings, entered a room under the impression that it might be the library, and had hardly done so when the sound of men’s voices in a room adjoining came to me—the door between the rooms stood partly open.