--a
dining-hall with carved stone chimney-piece and painted ceiling, used
as a storehouse for apples; another fine apartment in which a heap of
potatoes reposed snugly in a corner, packed in straw; there was a
spacious kitchen with a fire-place as large as a moderate-sized room--a
kitchen that had been abandoned altogether to spiders, beetles, rats,
and mice. A whole army of four-footed vermin scampered off as Vixen
crossed the threshold. She could see them scuttling and scurrying along
by the wall, with a whisking of slender tails as they vanished into
their holes. The beetles were disporting themselves on the desolate
hearth, the spiders had woven draperies for the dim dirty windows. The
rustling leaves of a fig-tree, that had grown close to this side of the
house, flapped against the window-panes with a noise of exceeding
ghostliness.

From the kitchen Vixen wandered to the out-houses, and found Argus
howling dismally in a grass-grown court-yard, evidently believing
himself abandoned by the world. His rapture at beholding his mistress
was boundless.

"You darling, I would give the world to let you loose," cried Vixen,
after she had been nearly knocked down by the dog's affectionate
greeting; "but I mustn't just yet. I'll come by-and-by and take you for
a walk. Yes, dear old boy, we'll have a long ramble together, just as
we used to do at home."

Home, now she had left it, seemed so sweet a word that her lips
trembled a little as she pronounced it.

Everything without the house was as dreary as it was within. Poverty
had set its mark on all things, like a blight. Decay was visible
everywhere--in the wood-work, in the stone-work, in hinges and handles,
thresholds and lintels, ceilings and plastered walls. It would have
cost a thousand pounds to put the manor house in decent habitable
order. To have restored it to its original dignity and comeliness would
have cost at least five thousand. Miss Skipwith could afford to spend
nothing upon the house she lived in; indeed she could barely afford the
necessaries of life. So for the last thirty years Les Tourelles had
been gradually decaying, until the good old house had arrived at a
stage in which decay could hardly go farther without lapsing into
destruction.

A door opened out of the court-yard into the weedy garden. This was not
without a kind of beauty that had survived long neglect. The spreading
fig-trees, the bushes of bright red fuchsia, and the unpruned roses