Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/268

260 The young lady who had given utterance to this amazing rigmarole stood at the top of a terrace light (much cracked and broken) between two leaden statuettes (headless)—a willowy child in a large-brimmed hat, with a riding-switch in one hand and the other holding up an old tartan shawl, which she had pinned about her to imitate a horse-woman's habit. As she paced to and fro between the leaden statuettes—

—and I noted almost at once that two or three butterflies ("red admirals" they were) floated and circled about her in the sunlight. A child of commoner make, and perhaps a year older, dressed in a buff print frock and pink sunbonnet, looked up at her from the foot of the steps. The faces of both were averted, and I stood there for at least a minute on the verge of the laurels, unobserved, considering the picture they made, and the ruinous Jacobean house that formed its background.

Never was house more eloquent of desolation. Unpainted shutters, cracking in the heat, blocked one half of its windows. Weather-stains ran down the slates from the lantern on the main roof. The lantern over the stable had lost its vane, and the stable-clock its minute-hand. The very nails had dropped out of the gable wall, and the wistaria and Gloire de Dijons they should have supported trailed down in tangles, like curtains. Grass choked the