Lady Bell had tried for the last half-hour to catch a glimpse of the country round St. Bevis’s through the steaming chaise windows. The fact was, that all the country was new to her, except what, in her ignorance, she had called country when she had gone out of town for a day’s pleasure to Chelsea, or Richmond, or Greenwich. But the most ardent admirer of the country, pure and simple, will admit that the close of a dismal day in the fall of the year, when the fields are bare, and the woods half stripped, is hardly a propitious season for a novice making her first acquaintance with the country, even though she be not turning her back on the delights of youth, though the country inns at which she has lain have not been comfortless, though the roads are not quagmires, and though her nerves are not shaken with fears of highwaymen. “Lud, how horrid lonesome it do be here,” exclaimed the maid who sat inside with Lady Bell, while the man sat outside with the driver. “We shall see a man hanging in chains at the next cross roads, I come bound. It would give me the dumps in no time to be kept down here. However do country bumpkins and their sweethearts make shift to exist in such a hole? In course, it is quite different with the gentlefolks, who can have their country houses full of company.” The woman corrected herself, remembering, in time, Lady Bell’s circumstances. Lady Bell could not find fault, for she caught herself echoing the reflection in her own style as she pressed her white face against the glass, “What can life be like here without a court, or assemblies, or drums, or even shops—and we have not passed a waggon or pack-horses since we left the great road.” At last the driver proceeded to draw up his horses, mud and mire to the fetlocks. There before Lady Bell rose a portion of a pillared façade, belonging to a great house that had never been completely built, and of which the fragments were only dimly illuminated by the light from within, confined to a few windows, and by a lamp swinging over the entrance-door. The whole building had a cheerless and spectral air to Lady Bell. There was no want of life in it, however, such as it was. A troop of men, most of them in stable-boy’s jackets or country frocks, one or two in tarnished livery, rushed out at the sound of wheels to hail the chaise, and shout for news before the travellers had time to alight. “Any word of the Foxlow races, driver, before you started?” “Were Nimble Dick’s dying speech and confession come out?” “Shut your pipes, you rude rascals; it is the young lady, the squire’s niece,” protested a more civilised voice than those of the others; while a bloated, pursy man in slovenly black, who might be either butler or chaplain to Squire Godwin, stepped forward, opened the door, and helped the cramped, shivering girl out, amidst a slight cessation of the rough clamour. “Your servant, Lady Bell Etheredge; follow me.”