Then, from a lateral path, a closed carriage and pair drove rapidly up to the Hall, and a footman bounced off the hammer-cloth. Denry could not see through the carriage, but under it he could distinguish the skirts of some one who got out of it. Evidently the Countess was just returning from a drive. He quickened his pace, for at heart he was an audacious boy. "She can’t eat me!" he said. This assertion was absolutely irrefutable, and yet there remained in his bold heart an irrational fear that after all she _could_ eat him. Such is the extraordinary influence of a Palladian façade! After what seemed several hours of torture entirely novel in his experience, he skirted the back of the carriage and mounted the steps to the portal. And, although the coachman was innocuous, being apparently carved in stone, Denry would have given a ten-pound note to find himself suddenly in his club or even in church. The masonry of the Hall rose up above him like a precipice. He was searching for the bell-knob in the face of the precipice when a lady suddenly appeared at the doors. At first he thought it was the Countess, and that heart of his began to slip down the inside of his legs. But it was not the Countess. "Well!" demanded the lady. She was dressed in black. "Can I see the Countess?" he inquired. The lady stared at him. He handed her his professional card which lay waiting all ready in his waistcoat pocket. "I will ask my lady," said the lady in black. Denry perceived from her accent that she was not English. She disappeared through a swinging door; and then Denry most clearly heard the Countess’s own authentic voice, saying in a pettish, disgusted tone: "Oh! Bother!" And he was chilled. He seriously wished that he had never thought of starting his confounded Universal Thrift Club. After some time the carriage suddenly drove off, presumably to the stables. As he was now within the hollow of the porch, a sort of cave at the foot of the precipice, he could not see along the length of the façade. Nobody came to him. The lady who had promised to ask my lady whether the latter could see him did not return. He reflected that she had not promised to return; she had merely promised to ask a question. As the minutes passed he grew careless, or grew bolder, gradually dropping his correct attitude of a man-about-town paying an afternoon call, and peered through the glass of the doors that divided him from the Countess. He could distinguish nothing that had life. One of his preliminary tremors had been caused by a fanciful vision of multitudinous footmen, through a double line of whom he would be compelled to walk in order to reach the Countess. But there was not even one footman. This complete absence of indoor footmen seemed to him remiss, not in accordance with centuries of tradition concerning life at Sneyd.