The journey began to seem unending, but just as Miss Rochdale was entertaining a suspicion that the coachman had lost his way in the darkness the horses slowed from a jog trot to a walk, and the vehicle swung round at a sharp angle, its wheels encountering an uneven gravel surface; as of a carriage drive ill kept. The pace was picked up again and maintained for a few hundred yards. The coach then drew to a standstill and the groom once more jumped down from the box.

A faint silver light had begun to illumine the scene, and as she stepped out of the coach Miss Rochdale was just able to see that the house she was about to enter was of a respectable size, although built in a rambling and rather low-pitched style. Two sharp gables and some very tall chimney stacks were silhouetted against the night sky, and a lamp burning in one of the rooms showed that the windows were latticed.

The groom had tugged at the big iron bell some moments before, and the echoes of its distant clanging still sounded when the door was opened. An elderly man in shabby livery held it for Miss Rochdale to enter the house, favoring her, as she passed him, with an intent and rather anxious scrutiny. She scarcely heeded this, for her attention was claimed by her surroundings, which were surprising enough to cause her to check on the threshold, looking about her in a good deal of bewilderment. What, her startled brain demanded, had the woman she had seen at Fenton’s Hotel to do with all this decayed grandeur?

The hall in which she found herself was a large, irregularly shaped room, with a superb oaken stairway at one end of it, and at the other a huge stone fireplace, big enough for the roasting of an ox, thought Miss Rochdale, and with a chimney which might be depended on to gush forth smoke any time some unwise person kindled a fire on the flags beneath it.