"
And Mary tried to be glad that whatever happened it was in her power to
help the unlucky couple.
The carriage lights gilded the marble stairs, showing cracks and a
green, mossy growth under each shallow step. There was a heavy fragrance
of datura flowers, sickly sweet, that mingled with a scent of moss and
mouldy, unkempt growing things, touching the imagination like the
perfume of sad memories.
Lord Dauntrey rang again and again the old-fashioned bell whose
insistent voice could be heard jangling through the house. At last, when
he had rung four times, a wavering light suddenly streaked with yellow
the glass crescent above the door. There was a noise of a chair falling,
a bolt slipping back, a key turning rustily; and through these sounds of
life the shrill yap, yap of a little dog cut like sharp crackings of a
whip. The door opened a few inches, and the yellow light haloed a dark
head.
"Who is it?" a woman's voice called out in bad Italian, through the
shrill bursts of barking.
Lord Dauntrey could neither speak nor understand Italian; but already
Mary was halfway up the steps. "It is the Signorina Grant, of whom you
have heard," she explained. "You know from the lawyer that Captain
Hannaford has given his place to me?"
"Ah, the Signorina at last!" exclaimed the voice, with an accent of joy.
"Be thou still, little ten times devil!" The door opened wide, and a
gust of wind would have blown out the flame of the lamp in the woman's
hand had she not hastily stepped back into the shelter of a vestibule,
at the same time squeezing the miniature wolf-hound under her arm, so
that its yap was crushed into a stricken rumble.
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