inside of his legs. But it was not the Countess.

"Well?" demanded the lady. She was dressed in black.

"Can I see the Countess?" he inquired.

The lady stared at him. He handed her his professional card which lay
waiting all ready in his waistcoat pocket.

"I will ask my lady," said the lady in black.

Denry perceived from her accent that she was not English.

She disappeared through a swinging door; and then Denry most clearly
heard the Countess's own authentic voice saying in a pettish, disgusted
tone:

"Oh! Bother!"

And he was chilled. He seriously wished that he had never thought of
starting his confounded Universal Thrift Club.

After some time the carriage suddenly drove off, presumably to the
stables. As he was now within the hollow of the porch, a sort of cave at
the foot of the precipice, he could not see along the length of the
facade. Nobody came to him. The lady who had promised to ask my lady
whether the latter could see him did not return. He reflected that she
had not promised to return; she had merely promised to ask a question.
As the minutes passed he grew careless, or grew bolder, gradually
dropping his correct attitude of a man-about-town paying an afternoon
call, and peered through the glass of the doors that divided him from
the Countess. He could distinguish nothing that had life. One of his
preliminary tremors had been caused by a fanciful vision of
multitudinous footmen, through a double line of whom he would be
compelled to walk in order to reach the Countess.

But there was not even one footman. This complete absence of indoor
footmen seemed to him remiss, not in accordance with centuries of
tradition concerning life at Sneyd.

Then he caught sight, through the doors, of the back of Jock, the
Countess's carriage footman and the son of his mother's old friend. Jock
was standing motionless at a half-open door to the right of the space
between Denry's double doors and the next pair of double doors. Denry
tried to attract his attention by singular movements and strange noises
of the mouth. But Jock, like his partner the coachman, appeared to be
carven in stone. Denry decided that he would go in and have speech with
Jock. They were on Christian-name terms, or had been a few years ago. He
unobtrusively pushed at the doors, and at the very same moment Jock,
with a start--as though released from some spell--vanished away from the
door to the right.

Denry was now within.

"Jock!" He