Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/16

. On the other hand, if she climbed the hill up the narrower branch of the way, Somerset Lane, she would come, she knew, to the white cottage beside the road where lived Miss Miranda Reynolds, a friend of her father's whom she had been bidden to go to see. When she set forth after school she had purposed vaguely going to one place or the other. If to Miss Reynolds', it would be putting off the moment of her decision a little longer, if to Aunt Susan's, it would end in settling the matter once for all.

She turned about on the stone and looked up the crooked path of Somerset Lane, winding steeply up the slope above her and ending before a great stone entrance-way with barred iron gates. Beyond the gates she could catch further glimpses of rising ground, groups of trees and, at the very summit of the hill, the broken walls of a ruined building. It must have been a fire, she concluded, after staring upward for some minutes, that had so blackened the stone walls and left them standing, empty and desolate, with here and there a blank window or the part of an arched doorway. For very weariness with pondering her own problem, she began to let her mind wander away in vague curiosity as to how such destruction had come about and how the fire had looked as it had swept blazing across the long roofs until they crashed and fell, had glowed behind