her
own request was left to get herself into sleeping trim, started on the
long journey through corridors and state-rooms through which her young
ladyship's own quarters had to be reached. Corridors on whose floors one
walked up and down hill; great chambers full of memories, and here and
there indulging in a ghost. Tudor rooms with Holbeins between the
windows, invisible to man; Jacobean rooms with Van Dycks, nearly as
regrettably invisible; Lelys and Knellers, much more regrettably
visible. Across the landing the great staircase, where the Reynolds
hangs, which your _cicerone_ of this twentieth century will tell you was
the famous beauty of her time, and the grandmother of another famous
Victorian beauty, dead not a decade since. And on this staircase Gwen,
half pausing to glance at her departed prototype, started suddenly, and
exclaimed:--"What's that?"

For a bell had broken the silence of the night--a bell that had enjoyed
doing so, and was slow to stop. Now a bell after midnight in a house
that stands alone in a great Park, two miles from the nearest village,
has to be accounted for, somehow. Not by Miss Lutwyche, who merely noted
that the household would hear and answer the summons.

Her young ladyship was not so indifferent to human affairs as her
attendant. She said:--"I must know what that is. They won't send to tell
me. Come back!" She had said it, and started, before that bell gave in
and retired from public life.

Past the Knellers and Lelys, among the Van Dycks, a scared figure,
bearing a missive. Miss Lupin, and no ghost--as she might have been--in
the farther door as her ladyship passes into the room. She has run
quickly with it, and is out of breath. "A telegraph for your ladyship!"
is all she can manage. She would have said "telegram" a few years later.

A rapid vision, in Gwen's mind, of her father's remains, crushed by a
locomotive, itself pulverised by another--for these days were rich in
railway accidents--then a hope! It may be the fall of Sebastopol; a
military cousin had promised she should know it as soon as the Queen.
Give her the paper and end the doubt!... It is neither.

It is serious, for all that. Who brought this?--that's the first
question, from Gwen. Lupin gives a hurried account. It is Mr. Sandys,
the station-master at Grantley Thorpe, who has galloped over himself to
make sure of delivery. Is he gone? No--he has taken his horse round to
Archibald at the Stables to refit for a qu