’Can you tell me if there is any house within reach where I can stop for the night?’ He gave a succinct account of his journey, the lost road, the increasing storm.  ’My horse is dead tired, but it might go a mile or so farther.’

The serving-woman, evincing some little curiosity, received from the girl an interpretation in low and rapid French.  The woman expressed by her gestures some pity for man and beast.  The girl replied with gentle brevity—­

’We know that the roads are snowed up.  The next house is three miles farther on.’

He hesitated, but his necessity was obvious.

‘I am afraid I must beg for a night’s shelter.’

He had been wondering a good deal what she would say, how she would accede, and then he perceived that her dignity knew no circumlocution.  ‘I will send the man for your horse.’  She said it with hardly a moment’s pause.

The woman gave him a small broom, an implement to the use of which he had grown accustomed, and disappeared upon the errand.  The girl stood still in her statuesque pose of light-bearer.  The young man busied himself in brushing the snow from cap and coat and boots.  As he brushed himself he felt elation in the knowledge, not ordinarily uppermost, that he was a good-looking fellow and a gentleman.

CHAPTER II

‘My name is Courthope.’  The visitor, denuded of coat and cap, presented his card, upon which was written, ‘Mr. George Courthope.’

He began telling his hostess whence he came and what was his business.  A quarry which a dead relative had bequeathed to him had had sufficient attraction to bring him across the sea and across this railless region.  His few words of self-introduction were mingled with and followed by regrets for his intrusion, expressions of excessive gratitude.  All the time his mind was questioning amazedly.

By the time the speeches which he deemed necessary were finished, he had followed the girl into a spacious room, furnished in the large gay style of the fifties, brilliantly lit, as if for a festival, and warmed by a log fire of generous dimensions.  Having led him in, listening silently the while, and put her additional lamp upon the table, she now spoke, with no empressement, almost with a manner of insouciance.

’You are perfectly welcome; my father would never have wished his house to be inhospitable.’

With her words his own apologies seemed to lose their significance; he felt a little foolish, and she, with some slight evidence of childish awkwardness, seemed to seek a pretext for short escape.

‘I will tell my sister.’  These words came with more abruptness, as if the interior excitement was working itself to the surface.

The room was a long one.  She went out by a door at the farther end, and, as with intense curiosity he watched her quickly receding form, he noticed that when she thought herself out of his sight she entered the other room with a skip.  At that same end of the room hung a full-length portrait of a gentleman.  It was natural that Courthope should walk towards it, trying to become acquainted with some link in the train of circumstances which had raised this enchanted palace in the wilderness; he had not followed to hear, but he overheard.