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Updated: May 21, 2025
A vague curiosity possessed him as to what attracted her. Then she crossed the floor with that determined step of hers, and went along the loft, the planks betraying her. He heard her swift feet on the ladder, and coming down the gangway toward the saddle-room. In another moment she stood before him. A woolly cap was on her head, and a long muffler flung about her throat.
But he was a good-natured creature, and now and then, for a change, I followed him into the saddle-room. I am thankful to say I have never caught mice except for amusement, and a cat of daintier tastes does not exist. But one has inherited instincts and the musty, fusty, mousey smell of the room did excite me a little. Besides, I practised my steps among the blacking-bottles.
It consists of two rooms on each side of the front door, with a tiny passage used as larder, wood-hole, saddle-room, &c. Our room is our bed and drawing-room combined, which is hung all round with every imaginable skin, wolf, skunks, lynx, &c., stuffed animals and birds, guns and traps, to say nothing of shelves covered with different specimens of ore taken out of the adjoining mines.
He marked the fair lad in the door of the saddle-room and greeted him in his large and leisurely way: "Good morning, Albert," he said. "Morning, sir." "Where are the other lads?" "Where they ought to be, sir. In the Lads' Barn, waiting for Miss Boy." "And why aren't you there?" asked the young man, amused. Albert, in fact, spent all his spare time of late shaving.
Thus pondering, he forgot all about his projected ride, and, going up to the study he had contrived for himself in the rambling roof of the ancient house, began looking along the backs of his books, in search of some suggestion of how to approach Letty; his glance fell on a beautifully bound volume of verse a selection of English lyrics, made with tolerable judgment which he had bought to give, but the very color of which, every time his eye flitting along the book-shelves caught it, threw a faint sickness over his heart, preluding the memory of old pain and loss: "It may as well serve some one," he said, and, taking it down, carried it with him to the saddle-room.
At a little distance stands the stable, saddle-room, etc., and a good bedroom for English servants, and beyond that, again, among large clumps of rose-bushes, a native hut. It came up here half built that is, the frame was partly put together elsewhere and it resembled a huge crinoline more than anything else in its original state.
They must have failed." He had hardly spoken the words when he fancied he heard steps; but all was still, and then he started violently and clapped his hand to his sword, for some one tried to open the saddle-room door, then shook it, and the words of whoever it was came plainly to the lad's cars: "I can't, Sir Robert. He has shut us in."
He moved away and went back to the corner in the saddle-room he had made his own partly because he could smoke there undisturbed, and far more because it was directly under the girl's room, and he loved to hear her stirring above him. He lit his pipe, settled himself, and began to brood. The girl was still there he could tell by the sound; and still at the window.
The key was turned in the door. There was no sound from within, except the movement of the horses, to whom the girl was bidding good-bye. Half an hour later the door was opened, and she came out, cold and frosty as she had entered. Monkey Brand, standing in the door of the saddle-room, keeping guard over the stable-lads lest they should peep and pry, saw her come.
They went together to the stables, where he introduced her to Hollis, the coachman standing in his shirtsleeves in a saddle-room that smelt of harness-polish. He stood in front of a cracked mirror brushing his hair, hissing softly, as though he were grooming a horse, and round his waist was a red-striped belt of the webbing out of which a horse's belly-band is made. "Well, Mr.
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