’No, no, no.  Lesbia is very lovely—­and I could not expect you would care for me till she was gone away.  How glad I am that she went,’ added Mary, naively.

The sky, which had been cloudless all day, began to darken as Lord Hartfield drove back to Fellside, and Mary drew a little closer to the driver’s elbow, as if for shelter from an impending tempest.

‘You have no waterproof, of course,’ he said, looking down at her, as the first big drops of a thunder shower dashed upon the splash-board.  ’No young woman in the Lake country would think of being without a waterproof.’

Mary was duly provided, and with the help of the groom put herself into a snug little tartan Inverness, while Hartfield sent the cart spinning along twelve miles an hour.

They were at Fellside before the storm developed its full power, but the sky was leaden, the landscape dull and blotted, the atmosphere heavy and stifling.  The thunder grumbled hoarsely, far away yonder in the wild gorges of Borrowdale; and Mary and her husband made up their minds that the tempest would come before midnight.

Lady Maulevrier was suffering from the condition of the atmosphere.  She had gone to bed, prostrate with a neuralgic headache, and had given orders that no one but her maid should go near her.  So Lord Hartfield and his wife dined by themselves, in the room where Mary had eaten so many uninteresting dinners tete-a-tete with Fraeulein; and in spite of the storm which howled, pelted, and lightened every now and then, Mary felt as if she were in Paradise.

There was no chance of going out after dinner.  The lake looked like a pool of ink, the mountains were monsters of dark and threatening aspect, the rain rattled against the windows, 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.