and ran from the verandah in
miniature water-spouts. There was nothing to do but stay in doors, in
the sultry, dusky house.

'Let us go to my boudoir,' said Mary. 'Let me enjoy the full privilege
of having a boudoir--my very own room. Wasn't it too good of grandmother
to have it made so smart for me?'

'Nothing can be too good for my Mary,' answered her husband, still in
the doting stage, 'but it was very nice of her ladyship--and the room is
charming.'

Delightful as the new boudoir might be, they dawdled in the picture
gallery, that long corridor on which all the upper rooms opened, and at
one end of which was the door of Lady Maulevrier's bedroom, at right
angles with that red-cloth door, which was never opened, except to give
egress or ingress to James Steadman, who kept the key of it, as if the
old part of Fellside House had been an enchanted castle. Lord Hartfield
had not forgotten that summer midnight last year, when his meditations
were disturbed by a woman's piercing cry. He thought of it this evening,
as Mary and he lowered their voices on drawing near Lady Maulevrier's
door. She was asleep within there now, perhaps, that strange old woman;
and at any moment an awful shriek, as of a soul in mortal agony, might
startle them in the midst of their bliss.

The lamps were lighted below; but this upper part of the house was
wrapped in the dull grey twilight of a stormy evening. A single lamp
burned dimly at the further end of the corridor, and all the rest was
shadow.

Mary and her husband walked up and down, talking in subdued tones. He
was explaining the necessity of his being in London next week, and
promising to come back to Fellside directly his business at the House
was over.

'It will be delightful to read your speeches,' said Mary; 'but I am
silly and selfish enough to wish you were a country squire, with no
business in London. And yet I don't wish that either, for I am intensely
proud of you.'

'And some day, before we are much older, you will sit in your robes in
the peeress's gallery.'

'Oh, I couldn't,' cried Mary. 'I should make a fool of myself, somehow.
I should look like a housemaid in borrowed plumes. Remember, I have no
_Anstand_--I have been told so all my life.'

'You will be one of the prettiest peeresses who ever sat in that
gallery, and the purest, and truest, and dearest,' protested her
lover-husband.

'Oh, if I am good enough for you, I am satisfied. I married _you_, and
not t