It was a square grey building, with narrow windows in straight rows. There was nothing about it in the very least picturesque or attractive, for it was far too modern to at all suggest anything mediaeval or mysterious; it was just thoroughly ugly and forbidding. Yet to me it was full of fascination. We never passed the point of view in question without my begging Isabel to stop and have a good look at it, which at last she began to be rather unwilling to do. "I think really it is getting on your brain, Regina," she said. "I almost wish I had never told you anything about it." "As if any one could have helped noticing it," I exclaimed. "But for the neatly kept grounds"--for neat they were, so far as one could see, though with nothing ornamental about them at this season at least--"one could be tempted to think it was a prison or a workhouse." "Prisons and workhouses are models of neatness, I believe," said Isabel. "But certainly these gardens could not belong to anything of the kind. And there are flowers at one side of the house later on in the year. I have an idea that the younger brother--the cripple--looks after them." "Have you ever seen him gardening?" I asked eagerly. Isabel shook her head. "Oh, no," she replied, "I have never seen one of the family except in church." "I am longing for Sunday," I said. For though I had already been more than a week at Millflowers, I had not yet been to the village church, as on my first Sunday there we had driven some miles in a different direction, by Mr Wynyard's wish, to hear a noted preacher who happened to be visiting in that neighbourhood. We were standing just then, Isabel and I, on the rising ground I have spoken of, and my eyes were fixed on Grimsthorpe. "No," I went on, "I have never seen anything so strange. It might be an enchanted--not `palace,' it is too ugly for that. I don't know what to call it. We have stood here some minutes, and there has not been the very slightest sign of life to be seen or heard. Not even a dog barking. How do they manage to make even their servants as noiseless and invisible as themselves?" "You are drawing on your imagination a little," said Isabel, smiling. "There _is_ a gardener mowing the grass in that corner. See!" and she pointed it out, "and--yes! there is the baker's cart driving up the back entrance." I was almost disappointed by her matter-of-factness. "You are so desperately unromantic," I said impatiently. "You needn't have pointed out the gardener and the baker!" And in my own mind I thought that I would keep my curiosity more to myself in the future. "I don't believe Isabel would at all sympathise in any plan for getting to know these people!" but in this I did her injustice.