Lady Walderhurst herself did not look well, For the last two or three nights she had been starting from her sleep again with that eerie feeling of being wakened by someone at her bedside, though she had found no one when she had examined the room on getting up.

“I am sorry to say I am afraid I am getting a little nervous,” she had said to Jane Cupp.  “I will begin to take valerian, though it is really very nasty.”

Jane herself had a somewhat harried expression of countenance.  She did not mention to her mistress that for some days she had been faithfully following a line of conduct she had begun to mark out for herself.  She had obtained a pair of list slippers and had been learning to go about softly.  She had sat up late and risen from her bed early, though she had not been rewarded by any particularly marked discoveries.  She had thought, however, that she observed that Ameerah did not look at her as much as had been her habit, and she imagined she rather avoided her.  All she said to Lady Walderhurst was: 

“Yes, my lady, mother thinks a great deal of valerian to quiet the nerves.  Will you have a light left in your room to-night, my lady?”

“I am afraid I could not sleep with a light,” her mistress answered.  “I am not used to one.”

She continued to sleep, disturbedly some nights, in the dark.  She was not aware that on some of the nights Jane Cupp either slept or laid awake in the room nearest to her.  Jane’s own bedroom was in another part of the house, but in her quiet goings about in the list shoes she now and then saw things which made her nervously determined to be within immediate call.

“I don’t say it isn’t nerves, mother,” she said, “and that I ain’t silly to feel so suspicious of all sorts of little things, but there’s nights when I couldn’t stand it not to be quite near her.”

Chapter Sixteen

The Lime Avenue was a dim, if lovely, place at twilight.  When the sun was setting, broad lances of gold slanted through the branches and glorified the green spaces with mellow depths of light.  But later, when the night was drawing in, the lines of grey tree-trunks, shadowed and canopied by boughs, suggested to the mind the pillars of some ruined cathedral, desolate and ghostly.

Jane Cupp, facing the gloom of it during her lady’s dinner-hour, and glancing furtively from side to side as she went, would have been awed by the grey stillness, even if she had not been in a timorous mood to begin with.  In the first place, the Lime Avenue, which was her ladyship’s own special and favourite walk, was not the usual promenade of serving-maids.  Even the gardeners seldom set foot in it unless to sweep away dead leaves and fallen wood.  Jane herself had never been here before.  This evening she had gone absolutely because she was following Ameerah.

She was following Ameerah because, during the afternoon tea-hour in the servants’ hall, she had caught a sentence or so in the midst of a gossiping story, which had made her feel that she should be unhappy if she did not go down the walk and to the water-side,—­see the water, the boat, the steps, everything.