But Mrs. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by her and her thoughts.  She was the kind of woman who would “stand no nonsense from young ones.”  At least, that is what she would have said if she had been asked.  She had not wanted to go to London just when her sister Maria’s daughter was going to be married, but she had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and the only way in which she could keep it was to do at once what Mr. Archibald Craven told her to do.  She never dared even to ask a question.

“Captain Lennox and his wife died of the cholera,” Mr. Craven had said in his short, cold way.  “Captain Lennox was my wife’s brother and I am their daughter’s guardian.  The child is to be brought here.  You must go to London and bring her yourself.”

So she packed her small trunk and made the journey.

Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful.  She had nothing to read or to look at, and she had folded her thin little black-gloved hands in her lap.  Her black dress made her look yellower than ever, and her limp light hair straggled from under her black crepe hat.

“A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life,” Mrs. Medlock thought. (Marred is a Yorkshire word and means spoiled and pettish.) She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything; and at last she got tired of watching her and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.

“I suppose I may as well tell you something about where you are going to,” she said.  “Do you know anything about your uncle?”

“No,” said Mary.

“Never heard your father and mother talk about him?”

“No,” said Mary frowning.  She frowned because she remembered that her father and mother had never talked to her about anything in particular.  Certainly they had never told her things.

“Humph,” muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at her queer, unresponsive little face.  She did not say any more for a few moments and then she began again.

“I suppose you might as well be told something—­to prepare you.  You are going to a queer place.”

Mary said nothing at all, and Mrs. Medlock looked rather discomfited by her apparent indifference, but, after taking a breath, she went on.

“Not but that it’s a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mr. Craven’s proud of it in his way—­and that’s gloomy enough, too.  The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor, and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked.  And there’s pictures and fine old furniture and things that’s been there for ages, and there’s a big park round it and gardens and trees with branches trailing to the ground—­some of them.”  She paused and took another breath.  “But there’s nothing else,” she ended suddenly.

Mary had begun to listen in spite of herself.  It all sounded so unlike India, and anything new rather attracted her.  But she did not intend to look as if she were interested.  That was one of her unhappy, disagreeable ways.  So she sat still.