whilst spending thousands on the new part of the house, had deemed the
existing stables good enough for her stud. They were spacious old
stables, built as solidly as a Norman castle, and with all the virtues
and all the vices of their age.

Mary looked round her with a sigh. The stillness of the place was
oppressive, and within doors she knew there would be the same stillness,
made still more oppressive by the society of the Fräulein, who grew
duller and duller every day, as it seemed to Mary.

She took her pony into the dusky old stable, where four other ponies
began rattling their halters in the gloom, by way of greeting. A bundle
of purple tares lay ready in a corner for Mary to feed her favourites;
and for the next ten minutes or so she was happily employed going from
stall to stall, and gratifying that inordinate appetite for green meat
which seems natural to all horses.

Not a groom or stable-boy appeared while she was in the stable; and she
was just going away, when her attention was caught by a flood of
sunshine streaming into an old disused harness-room at the end of the
stable--a room with one small window facing the Fell.

Whence could that glow of western light come? Assuredly not from the
low-latticed window which faced eastward, and was generally obscured by
a screen of cobwebs. The room was only used as a storehouse for lumber,
and it was nobody's business to clean the window.

Mary looked in, curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often
noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old
quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled