th high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and
his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.

It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
front of the central portion of this house.

A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.

What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. Al