It was a great
place, stately in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung.
To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed,
blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not
one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among
all of which it was dead master--rolling acres, great trees, lost
gardens and deserted groves.
"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"
Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he
had looked before.
"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest. It belonged to
Mount Dunstans then."
"And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like this!"
"They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the surly
liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."
It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master's
house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by
response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly
erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.
Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina
roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.
"I am very much obliged to you," she began, and then paused a second.
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