Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/22

 the distant college held a fascination for him as well as for her. She thought for a moment of waiting to ask him the way, but her eye caught sight, just then, of a green roof above her among the trees and she went onward.

As she opened the gate beside the lane and walked up the path to the house, she felt, almost in spite of herself, an immediate liking for the place. It was a tiny white cottage with a wide-eaved roof, with two big red brick chimneys that told of broad hearthstones inside, with swinging windows and clambering vines and a square lawn skirted at one side by a high stone wall. Beyond this wall she could see again the blackened ruins that had aroused her curiosity as she sat at the crossroads below. What a wide and stately house it must have been there at the top of the hill and how strange it was that it had never been rebuilt! She must be sure to ask Miss Reynolds about it, for there was, somehow, a spell of haunting mystery about those roofless walls and empty windows that seemed to stare away across the wide view spread out below them. There was time for her to observe all these things as she stood upon the doorstep for, although she rang the bell twice, no one came to admit her.

"I don't want to come all this way for nothing," she thought; "I will go to the side door and find some way of leaving word that I have been here."