I crept back into the house and up to my room, unpacked my boxes, and sat down to write to my mother an account of my journey and arrival. I did not tell her quite all that I had seen, or all the strange impressions this first evening had made upon me. I felt very anxious to communicate them to somebody; but my mother was a gentle nervous woman, whom I had already, young as I was, learned to lead rather than be led by; I knew that the least suggestion of mystery would cause her an agony of doubt and anxiety about her child which I could not allay by letter; so I contented myself with a description of the picturesque beauty of the place and of Mr. Rayner’s kindness. I had to finish this by candle-light, and, when I had ended, I rose and went to the window to give one more look at the scene under a new aspect. My window, I afterwards found, was over the one at which I had seen Mrs. Rayner’s face; it was high enough from the ground for me to have, through the gaps between the trees, a good view of the marsh and the hills beyond. A low cry of admiration burst from me as I looked out. Over all the wide expanse of marsh, which seemed to stretch for miles on either hand, lay a white mist, rising only a few feet from the ground, but so thick as to look like a silver lake in the moonlight; a range of hills two or three miles off seemed to mark the opposite shore. The mist was dense under my window, too, on the very grass that I had waded through a couple of hours before. As I looked out and tried to imagine little fairy boats in the elders which rose here and there out of the mist-hidden marsh, a shiver passed over me; and I drew in my head with a sudden change of thought. “How cold it is! Mr. and Mrs. Rayner must be devoted admirers of the picturesque to live in a house that must be so very damp!” CHAPTER II. I was down in the dining-room the next morning, with the unfailing punctuality of a new-comer, at the sound of the breakfast-bell, before any one else was there. Mr. Rayner came in in a few minutes, handsome, cheerful, but rather preoccupied; and I was listening to his bright small-talk with the polite stranger’s smile, when I discovered, without having heard any sound, that Mrs. Rayner was in the room. She had glided in like a ghost, and, without more interest in the life around her than a ghost might show, she was standing at the table, waiting. I was thankful to see that there was no trace in her eyes now of the steadfast eager gaze which had disconcerted me on the night before, nothing but the limpest indifference to me in the way in which she held out her hand when her husband introduced me.