"Ghosts!" I said to myself,
"ghosts! how absurd! how preposterously absurd! such an adorable spot
as this can only harbour sunshine and flowers."
I well remember, too--for, as I have already said, I was not
poetical--how much I enjoyed my first dinner at Glamis. The long
journey and keen mountain air had made me hungry, and I thought I had
never tasted such delicious food--such ideal salmon (from the Esk) and
such heavenly fruit. But I must tell you that, although I ate
heartily, as a healthy girl should, by the time I went to bed I had
thoroughly digested my meal, and was, in fact, quite ready to partake
of a few oatmeal biscuits I found in my dressing-case, and remembered
having bought at Perth. It was about eleven o'clock when my maid left
me, and I sat for some minutes wrapped in my dressing gown, before the
open window. The night was very still, and save for an occasional
rustle of the wind in the distant tree-tops, the hooting of an owl,
the melancholy cry of a peewit and the hoarse barking of a dog, the
silence was undisturbed.
The interior of my room was, in nearly every particular, modern.
The furniture was not old; there were no grim carvings; no
grotesquely-fashioned tapestries on the walls; no dark cupboards; no
gloomy corners;--all was cosy and cheerful, and when I got into bed no
thought of bogle or mystery entered my mind.
In a few minutes I was asleep, and for some time there was nothing but
a blank--a blank in which all identity was annihilated.
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