At last the plodding pony stopped again resolutely.  Long lines of Lombardy poplars here met the road.  They were but as the ghosts of trees; their stately shape, their regular succession, inspired him with some sentiment of romance which he did not stay to define.  He dimly discerned shrubs as if planted in a pleasure-ground.  Wading and fumbling he found a paling and a gate.  The pony turned off the high road with renewed courage in its motion; the Englishman, letting loose the rein, found himself drawn slowly up a long avenue of the ghostly poplar trees.  The road was straight, the land was flat, the poplars were upright.  The simplicity affected him with the notion that he was coming to an enchanted palace.  The pony approached the door of a large house, dim to the sight; its huge pointed tin roof, its stone sides, mantled as they were with snowflakes and fringed with icicles at eaves and lintels, hardly gave a dark outline in the glimmering storm.  The rays of light which twinkled through chinks of shutters might be analogous to the stars produced by a stunned brain; it seemed to the Englishman that if he went up and tried to knock on the door the ghostly house, the ghostly poplar avenue, would vanish.  The thought was born of the long monotony of a danger which had called for no activity of brain or muscle on his part.  The pony knew better; it stopped before the door.

The traveller stood in a small porch raised a step or two from the ground.  The door was opened by a middle-aged Frenchwoman clad in a peasant’s gown of bluish-grey.  Behind her, holding a lamp a little above her head, stood a young girl, large, womanly in form, with dimpled softness of face, and dressed in a rich but quaint garment of amber colour.  With raised and statuesque wrist she held the lamp aloft to keep the light from dazzling her eyes.  She was looking through the doorway with the quiet interest of responsibility, nothing of which was expressed in the servant’s furrowed countenance.

‘Is the master of the house at home?’

‘There is no master.’

The girl spoke with a mellow voice and with a manner of soft dignity; yet, having regarded the stranger, there leaped into her face, as it seemed to him, behind the outward calm of the dark eyes and dimpling curves, a certain excited interest and delight.  The current of thought thus revealed contrasted with the calm which she instinctively turned to him, as the words which an actor speaks aside contrast with those which are not soliloquy.

With more hesitation, more obvious modesty, he said—­

‘May I speak to the mistress of the house?’

‘I am the mistress.’

He could but look upon her more intently.  She could not have been more than eighteen years of age.  Her hair had the soft and loose manner of lying upon her head that is often seen in hair which has, till lately, been allowed to hang loose to the winds.  Her dress, folded over the full bosom and sweeping to the ground in ample curves, was, little as he could have described a modern fashion, even to his eyes evidently fantastic—­such as a child might don at play.  Above all, as evidence of her youth, there was that inward quiver of delight at his appearance and presence, veiled perfectly, but seen behind the veil, as one may detect glee rising in the heart of a child even though it be upon its formal behaviour.