The very next morning after her rather late arrival, she sent to saddle Dick once more, called Marquis, and with no other attendant, set out to see what they had done to dear old Raglan.  Marquis had been chained up almost all the time they were in London, and freedom is blessed even to a dog:  Dick was ever joyful under his mistress, and now was merry with the keen invigorating air of a frosty December morning, and frolicsome amidst the early snow, which lay unusually thick on the ground, notwithstanding his hundred and twenty miles’ ride, for they had taken nearly a week to do it; so that between them they soon raised Dorothy’s spirits also, and she turned to her hopes, and grew cheerful.

This mood made her the less prepared to encounter the change that awaited her.  What a change it was!  While she approached, what with the trees left, and the towers, the rampart, and the outer shell of the courts—­little injured to the distant eye, she had not an idea of the devastation within.  But when she rode through one entrance after another with the gates torn from their hinges, crossed the moat by a mound of earth instead of the drawbridge, and rode through the open gateway, where the portcullises were wedged up in their grooves and their chains gone, into the paved court, she beheld a desolation, at sight of which her heart seemed to stand still in her bosom.  The rugged horror of the heaps of ruins was indeed softly covered with snow, but what this took from the desolation in harshness, it added in coldness and desertion and hopelessness.  She felt like one who looks for the corpse of his friend, and finds but his skeleton.

The broken bones of the house projected gaunt and ragged.  Its eyes returned no shine—­they did not even stare, for not a pane of glass was left in a window:  they were but eye-holes, black and blank with shadow and no-ness.  The roofs were gone—­all but that of the great hall, which they had not dared to touch.  She climbed the grand staircase, open to the wind and slippery with ice, and reached her own room.  Snow lay on the floor, which had swollen and burst upwards with November rains.  Through room after room she wandered with a sense of loneliness and desolation and desertion such as never before had she known, even in her worst dreams.  Yet was there to her, in the midst of her sorrow and loss, a strange fascination in the scene.  Such a hive of burning human life now cold and silent!  Even Marquis appeared aware of the change, for with tucked-in tail he went about sadly sniffing, and gazing up and down.  Once indeed, and only once, he turned his face to the heavens, and gave a strange protesting howl, which made Dorothy weep, and a little relieved her oppressed heart.