The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he gazed upon the world. “A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir,” said he. “We have few such, except in Italy.” CHAPTER XXI. So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord of Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant almost to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the Hall, and actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he stept over it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so long been associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The footman ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of the building, and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire was nevertheless burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect undesirable in the somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently received orders respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once to his chamber, which seemed not to be one of those bachelor’s rooms, where, in an English mansion, young and single men are forced to be entertained with very bare and straitened accommodations; but a large, well, though antiquely and solemnly furnished room, with a curtained bed, and all manner of elaborate contrivances for repose; but the deep embrasures of the windows made it gloomy, with the little light that they admitted through their small panes. There must have been English attendance in this department of the household arrangements, at least; for nothing could exceed the exquisite nicety and finish of everything in the room, the cleanliness, the attention to comfort, amid antique aspects of furniture; the rich, deep preparations for repose.