before having been the weekly show-day for visitors, it was
doubtful if he could be admitted now.

'Who is at home?' said Somerset.

'Only Miss de Stancy,' the porteress replied.

His dread of being considered an intruder was such that he
thought at first there was no help for it but to wait till the
next week. But he had already through his want of effrontery
lost a sight of many interiors, whose exhibition would have
been rather a satisfaction to the inmates than a trouble. It
was inconvenient to wait; he knew nobody in the neighbourhood
from whom he could get an introductory letter: he turned and
passed the woman, crossed the ward where the gardeners were at
work, over a second and smaller bridge, and up a flight of
stone stairs, open to the sky, along whose steps sunburnt
Tudor soldiers and other renowned dead men had doubtless many
times walked. It led to the principal door on this side.
Thence he could observe the walls of the lower court in
detail, and the old mosses with which they were padded--mosses
that from time immemorial had been burnt brown every summer,
and every winter had grown green again. The arrow-slit and
the electric wire that entered it, like a worm uneasy at being
unearthed, were distinctly visible now. So also was the
clock, not, as he had supposed, a chronometer coeval with the
fortress itself, but new and shining, and bearing the name of
a recent maker.

The door was opened by a bland, intensely shaven man out of