The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems to be shut in—­ almost suffocated, to my north-country notions, by trees.  I have seen nobody but the man-servant who opened the door to me, and the housekeeper, a very civil person, who showed me the way to my own room, and got me my tea.  I have a nice little boudoir and bedroom, at the end of a long passage on the first floor.  The servants and some of the spare rooms are on the second floor, and all the living rooms are on the ground floor.  I have not seen one of them yet, and I know nothing about the house, except that one wing of it is said to be five hundred years old, that it had a moat round it once, and that it gets its name of Blackwater from a lake in the park.

Eleven o’clock has just struck, in a ghostly and solemn manner, from a turret over the centre of the house, which I saw when I came in.  A large dog has been woke, apparently by the sound of the bell, and is howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a corner.  I hear echoing footsteps in the passages below, and the iron thumping of bolts and bars at the house door.  The servants are evidently going to bed.  Shall I follow their example?

No, I am not half sleepy enough.  Sleepy, did I say?  I feel as if I should never close my eyes again.  The bare anticipation of seeing that dear face, and hearing that well-known voice to-morrow, keeps me in a perpetual fever of excitement.  If I only had the privileges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival’s best horse instantly, and tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun—­a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of hours and hours, like the famous highwayman’s ride to York.  Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper’s opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.

Reading is out of the question—­I can’t fix my attention on books.  Let me try if I can write myself into sleepiness and fatigue.  My journal has been very much neglected of late.  What can I recall—­ standing, as I now do, on the threshold of a new life—­of persons and events, of chances and changes, during the past six months—­ the long, weary, empty interval since Laura’s wedding-day?

Walter Hartright is uppermost in my memory, and he passes first in the shadowy procession of my absent friends.  I received a few lines from him, after the landing of the expedition in Honduras, written more cheerfully and hopefully than he has written yet.  A month or six weeks later I saw an extract from an American newspaper, describing the departure of the adventurers on their inland journey.  They were last seen entering a wild primeval forest, each man with his rifle on his shoulder and his baggage at his back.  Since that time, civilisation has lost all trace of them.  Not a line more have I received from Walter, not a fragment of news from the expedition has appeared in any of the public journals.