"On the contrary," he sang, in his slow voice, "she is looking forward to your coming as much as we both are. Oh, no, don't look on Mother as too old-fashioned, she's not so at all. She's tremendously up-to-date in art and literature and that kind of thing. She has her leaning towards the uncanny--spiritualism, and that kind of thing--nowadays, but Carlotta and I think that if it gives her an interest, all well and good." He tucked me up most carefully in the rugs, and the servant put a footwarmer at my feet. "Derbyshire, you know, is a cold county," continued Lord Lathkill, "especially among the hills." "It's a very dark county," I said. "Yes, I suppose it is, to one coming from the tropics. We, of course, don't notice it; we rather like it." He seemed curiously smaller, shrunken, and his rather long cheeks were sallow. His manner, however, was much more cheerful, almost communicative. But he talked, as it were, to the faceless air, not really to me. I wasn't really there at all. He was talking to himself. And when once he looked at me, his brown eyes had a hollow look, like gaps with nothing in them except a haggard, hollow fear. He was gazing through the windows of nothingness, to see if I were really there. It was dark when we got to Riddings. The house had no door in the front, and only two windows upstairs were lit. It did not seem very hospitable. We entered at the side, and a very silent manservant took my things. We went upstairs in silence, in the dead-seeming house. Carlotta had heard us, and was at the top of the stairs. She was already dressed; her long white arms were bare; she had something glittering on a dull green dress. "I was so afraid you wouldn't come," she said, in a dulled voice, as she gave me her hand. She seemed as if she would begin to cry. But of course she wouldn't. The corridor, dark-panelled and with blue carpet on the floor, receded dimly, with a certain dreary gloom. A servant was diminishing in the distance, with my bags, silently. There was a curious, unpleasant sense of the fixity of the materials of the house, the obscene triumph of dead Matter. Yet the place was warm, central-heated. Carlotta pulled herself together, and said, dulled: "Would you care to speak to my mother-in-law before you go to your room? She would like it." We entered a small drawing-room, abruptly. I saw the water-colours on the walls and a white-haired lady in black bending round to look at the door as she rose, cautiously. "This is Mr. Morier, Mother-in-law," said Carlotta, in her dull, rather quick way, "on his way to his room."