Clotilde opened the door and got out stiffly. She looked before her, then rubbed her eyes and looked again with a sickening feeling of having come unexpectedly upon a place that she had never seen before. This great open space inside the gate was surely not the place where they lived! But still, there was the little white gate, and there across the field was Samuel Skerry’s cottage where she and Mother Jeanne had once dwelt. “We have come down the wrong street,” she cried to Jason on the box, but he, in silence, only shook his head, the tears running down his black wrinkled face. The real truth began to dawn upon her, very slowly. Stephen Sheffield stepped out of the coach and, leaning on her arm, made his way, without speaking, through the gate and across what had once been the garden. Only a tall stone chimney, standing upright in the midst of a heap of smoking embers, showed where the great white house had stood. The fire that had consumed it had swept across the lawns, burning flowers and hedges and the dry, frost-killed grass. Of Master Simon’s garden there was nothing left save the littered gravel paths, the blackened linden tree and the stone-based sundial upon which the watery autumn sunlight was faintly marking the hour of noon. CHAPTER XIV COUSIN BETSEY ANNE Every door in Hopewell flew open wide to offer shelter to Master Sheffield now that he was homeless, but it was Samuel Skerry’s little cottage that, in the end, became his abode. It had been rebuilt three years before, for use when the great house was over-filled with guests, and it was now warm, cosy and comfortable, although a trifle narrow in its limits. “A man had best abide under his own roof,” Stephen had said when Mother Jeanne pointed out to him the discomforts of living through the winter in so small a place. So there they dwelt, Stephen, Clotilde, Mère Jeanne and black Jason, while the other servants were lodged in the village. Little by little, they learned the story of how the house and garden had been destroyed. It was plain that the soldiers had acted upon well-understood orders for they had stopped but a few moments, had given no time to robbery or pillage but, once convinced that Stephen was not there, had set fire to the house and stayed only to see that it was well ablaze. They had seemed to know, also, that the garden was the love and pride of its owner, for they had piled straw among the flowerbeds and about the hedges and trees, had laid the torch to this inflammable fuel and then had marched on again, leaving the whole place a mass of drifting smoke and evil, licking flames. Only the memory of Stephen’s stern command as he drove through the town had kept the people of Hopewell from falling upon the destroyers and giving them battle there in the streets.