“Very little,” replied the housekeeper.  “She talked principally of Sir Percival, and asked a great many questions about where he had been travelling, and what sort of lady his new wife was.  She seemed to be more soured and put out than distressed, by failing to find any traces of her daughter in these parts.  ’I give her up,’ were the last words she said that I can remember; ’I give her up, ma’am, for lost.’  And from that she passed at once to her questions about Lady Glyde, wanting to know if she was a handsome, amiable lady, comely and healthy and young——­Ah, dear!  I thought how it would end.  Look, Miss Halcombe, the poor thing is out of its misery at last!”

The dog was dead.  It had given a faint, sobbing cry, it had suffered an instant’s convulsion of the limbs, just as those last words, “comely and healthy and young,” dropped from the housekeeper’s lips.  The change had happened with startling suddenness—­in one moment the creature lay lifeless under our hands.

Eight o’clock.  I have just returned from dining downstairs, in solitary state.  The sunset is burning redly on the wilderness of trees that I see from my window, and I am poring over my journal again, to calm my impatience for the return of the travellers.  They ought to have arrived, by my calculations, before this.  How still and lonely the house is in the drowsy evening quiet!  Oh me! how many minutes more before I hear the carriage wheels and run downstairs to find myself in Laura’s arms?

The poor little dog!  I wish my first day at Blackwater Park had not been associated with death, though it is only the death of a stray animal.

Welmingham—­I see, on looking back through these private pages of mine, that Welmingham is the name of the place where Mrs. Catherick lives.  Her note is still in my possession, the note in answer to that letter about her unhappy daughter which Sir Percival obliged me to write.  One of these days, when I can find a safe opportunity, I will take the note with me by way of introduction, and try what I can make of Mrs. Catherick at a personal interview.  I don’t understand her wishing to conceal her visit to this place from Sir Percival’s knowledge, and I don’t feel half so sure, as the housekeeper seems to do, that her daughter Anne is not in the neighbourhood after all.  What would Walter Hartright have said in this emergency?  Poor, dear Hartright!  I am beginning to feel the want of his honest advice and his willing help already.

Surely I heard something.  Was it a bustle of footsteps below stairs?  Yes!  I hear the horses’ feet—­I hear the rolling wheels——­

II

June 15th.—­The confusion of their arrival has had time to subside.  Two days have elapsed since the return of the travellers, and that interval has sufficed to put the new machinery of our lives at Blackwater Park in fair working order.  I may now return to my journal, with some little chance of being able to continue the entries in it as collectedly as usual.