s
much as had been her habit, and she imagined she rather avoided her. All
she said to Lady Walderhurst was:

"Yes, my lady, mother thinks a great deal of valerian to quiet the
nerves. Will you have a light left in your room to-night, my lady?"

"I am afraid I could not sleep with a light," her mistress answered. "I
am not used to one."

She continued to sleep, disturbedly some nights, in the dark. She was
not aware that on some of the nights Jane Cupp either slept or laid
awake in the room nearest to her. Jane's own bedroom was in another part
of the house, but in her quiet goings about in the list shoes she now
and then saw things which made her nervously determined to be within
immediate call.

"I don't say it isn't nerves, mother," she said, "and that I ain't silly
to feel so suspicious of all sorts of little things, but there's nights
when I couldn't stand it not to be quite near her."

Chapter Sixteen

The Lime Avenue was a dim, if lovely, place at twilight. When the sun
was setting, broad lances of gold slanted through the branches and
glorified the green spaces with mellow depths of light. But later, when
the night was drawing in, the lines of grey tree-trunks, shadowed and
canopied by boughs, suggested to the mind the pillars of some ruined
cathedral, desolate and ghostly.

Jane Cupp, facing the gloom of it during her lady's dinner-hour, and
glancing furtively from side to side as she went, would have been awed
by the grey stillness, even if she had not been in a timorous mood to
begin with. In the first place, the Lime Avenue, which was her
ladyship's own special and favourite walk, was not the usual promenade
of serving-maids. Even the gardeners seldom set foot in it unless to
sweep away dead leaves and fallen wood. Jane herself had never been here
before. This evening she had gone absolutely because she was following
Ameerah.

She was following Ameerah because, during the afternoon tea-hour in the
servants' hall, she had caught a sentence or so in the midst of a
gossiping story, which had made her feel that she should be unhappy if
she did not go down the walk and to the water-side,--see the water, the
boat, the steps, everything.

"My word, mother!" she had said, "it's a queer business for a
respectable girl that's maid in a great place to be feeling as if she
had to watch black people, same as if she was in the police, and not
daring to say a word; for if I did say a word, Captain Osbor