I was left as wide awake as ever I had been in my life.  My child’s heart was filled with an unspeakable yearning, and yet the darkness and the mystery frightened me.  It could not be Miss Chinfeather who had visited me, I argued with myself.  The lips that had touched mine were not those of a corpse, but were instinct with life and love.  Who, then, could my mysterious visitor be?  Not Lady Chillington, surely!  I half started up in bed at the thought.  Just as I did so, without warning of any kind, a solemn muffled tramp became audible in the room immediately over mine.  A tramp, slow, heavy, measured, from one end of the room to the other, and then back again.  I slipped back into the bedclothes and buried myself up to the ears.  I could hear the beating of my heart, oppressed now with a new terror before which the lesser one faded utterly.  The very monotony of that dull measured walk was enough to unstring the nerves of a child, coming as it did in the middle of the night.  I tried to escape from it by going still deeper under the clothes, but I could hear it even then.  Since I could not escape it altogether, I had better listen to it with all my ears, for it was quite possible that it might come down stairs, and so into my room.  Had such a thing happened, I think I should have died from sheer terror.  Happily for me nothing of the kind took place; and, still listening, I fell asleep at last from utter weariness, and knew nothing more till I was awoke by a stray sunbeam smiting me across the eyes.

CHAPTER III.

A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY.

A golden sunbeam was shining through a crevice in the blinds; the birds were twittering in the ivy outside; oxen were lowing to each other across the park.  Morning, with all her music, was abroad.

I started up in bed and rubbed my eyes.  Within the house everything was as mute as the grave.  That horrible tramping overhead had ceased—­had ceased, doubtless, with the return of daylight, which would otherwise have shifted it from the region of the weird to that of the commonplace.  I smiled to myself as I thought of my terrors of the past night, and felt brave enough just then to have faced a thousand ghosts.  In another minute I was out of bed, and had drawn up my blind, and flung open my window, and was drinking in the sweet peaceful scene that stretched away before me in long level lines to the edge of a far-off horizon.

My window was high up and looked out at the front of the hall.  Immediately below me was a semicircular lawn, shut in from the park by an invisible fence, close shaven, and clumped with baskets of flowers glowing just now with all the brilliance of late autumn.  The main entrance—­a flight of shallow steps, and an Ionic portico, as I afterwards found—­was at one end of the building, and was reached by a long straight carriage drive, the route of which could be traced across the park by the thicker growth of trees with which it was fringed.  This park stretched to right and left for a mile either way.  In front, it was bounded, a short half-mile away, by the high road, beyond which were level wide-stretching meadows, through which the river Adair washed slow and clear.