A quarter of an hour's walk, for he knew the road this time, brought him
to the house. Glancing for a while at the spot where he had stood on the
previous night, he walked up the steps and pulled the bell. Though
he looked bold enough outwardly--indeed, rather imposing than
otherwise--with his broad shoulders and the great scar on his bronzed
face, his breast was full of terrors. In these, however, he had not
much time to indulge, for a footman, still decked in the trappings of
vicarious grief, opened the door with the most startling promptitude,
and he was ushered upstairs into a small but richly furnished room.

Madeline was not in the room, though to judge from the lace handkerchief
lying on the floor by a low chair, and the open novel on a little wicker
table alongside, she had not left it long. The footman departed, saying,
in a magnificent undertone, that "her ladyship" should be informed, and
left our hero to enjoy his sensations. Being one of those people whom
suspense of any sort makes fidgety, he employed himself in looking at
the pictures and china, even going so far as to walk to a pair of very
heavy blue velvet curtains that apparently communicated with another
room, and peep through them at a much larger apartment of which the
furniture was done up in ghostly-looking bags.

Retreating from this melancholy sight, finally he took up a position
on the hearthrug and waited. Would she be angry with him for coming? he
wondered. Would it recall things she had rather forget? But perhaps she
had already forgotten them--it was so long ago. Would she be very much
changed? Perhaps he should not know her. Perhaps--but here he happened
to lift his eyes, and there, standing between the two blue velvet
curtains, was Madeline, now a woman in the full splendour of a
remarkable beauty, and showing as yet, at any rate in that dull November
twilight, no traces of her years. There she stood, her large dark eyes