After some time the carriage suddenly drove off, presumably to the stables.  As he was now within the hollow of the porch, a sort of cave at the foot of the precipice, he could not see along the length of the facade.  Nobody came to him.  The lady who had promised to ask my lady whether the latter could see him did not return.  He reflected that she had not promised to return; she had merely promised to ask a question.  As the minutes passed he grew careless, or grew bolder, gradually dropping his correct attitude of a man-about-town paying an afternoon call, and peered through the glass of the doors that divided him from the Countess.  He could distinguish nothing that had life.  One of his preliminary tremors had been caused by a fanciful vision of multitudinous footmen, through a double line of whom he would be compelled to walk in order to reach the Countess.

But there was not even one footman.  This complete absence of indoor footmen seemed to him remiss, not in accordance with centuries of tradition concerning life at Sneyd.

Then he caught sight, through the doors, of the back of Jock, the Countess’s carriage footman and the son of his mother’s old friend.  Jock was standing motionless at a half-open door to the right of the space between Denry’s double doors and the next pair of double doors.  Denry tried to attract his attention by singular movements and strange noises of the mouth.  But Jock, like his partner the coachman, appeared to be carven in stone.  Denry decided that he would go in and have speech with Jock.  They were on Christian-name terms, or had been a few years ago.  He unobtrusively pushed at the doors, and at the very same moment Jock, with a start—­as though released from some spell—­vanished away from the door to the right.

Denry was now within.

“Jock!” He gave a whispering cry, rather conspiratorial in tone.  And as Jock offered no response, he hurried after Jock through the door to the right.  This door led to a large apartment which struck Denry as being an idealisation of a first-class waiting-room at a highly important terminal station.  In a wall to the left was a small door, half open.  Jock must have gone through that door.  Denry hesitated—­he had not properly been invited into the Hall.  But in hesitating he was wrong; he ought to have followed his prey without qualms.  When he had conquered qualms and reached the further door, his eyes were met, to their amazement, by an immense perspective of great chambers.  Denry had once seen a Pullman car, which had halted at Knype Station with a French actress on board.  What he saw now presented itself to him as a train of Pullman cars, one opening into the other, constructed for giants.  Each car was about as large as the large hall in Bursley Town Hall, and, like that auditorium, had a ceiling painted to represent blue sky, milk-white clouds, and birds.  But in the corners were groups of naked Cupids, swimming joyously on the ceiling; in Bursley Town Hall there