must be a visitor expected at some country house, but
none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar acquaintances,
were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be paying a visit
at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend her coming,
struck him as unusual. The brougham from the "Crown," though a decent
country town vehicle, seemed inadequate. Yet, there it stood drawn up
outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of a young lady
who had ordered its attendance and knew it would be there.

Wells felt a good deal of interest. Among the many young ladies who
descended from the first-class compartments and passed through the
little waiting-room on their way to the carriages of the gentry they
were going to visit, he did not know when a young lady had "caught his
eye," so to speak, as this one did. She was not exactly the kind of
young lady one would immediately class mentally as "a foreigner," but
the blue of her eyes was so deep, and her hair and eyelashes so dark,
that these things, combining themselves with a certain "way" she had,
made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar to the region, at least.

He was struck, also, by the fact that the young lady had no maid with
her. The truth was that Bettina had purposely left her maid in town. If
awkward things occurred, the presence of an attendant would be a sort
of complication. It was better, on the first approach, to be wholly
unencumbered.

"How far are we from Stornham Court?" she inquired.

"Five miles, my lady," he answered, touching his cap. She expressed
something which to the rural and ingenuous, whose standards were
defined, demanded a recognition of probable rank.

"I'd like to know," was his comment to his wife when he went home to
dinner, "who has gone to Stornham Court to-day. There's few enough
visitors go there, and none such as her, for certain. She don't live
anywhere on the line above here, either, for I've never seen her face
before. She was a tall, handsome one--she was, but it isn't just that
made you look after her. She was a clever one with a spirit, I'll be
bound. I was wondering what her ladyship would have to say to her."

"Perhaps she was one of HIS fine ladies?" suggestively.

"That she wasn't, either. And, as for that, I wonder what he'd have to
say to such as she is."

There was complexity of element enough in the thing she was on her way
to do, Bettina was thinking, as she was driven over