THE LONELY HOUSE MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES THE LONELY HOUSE GOOD OLD ANNA LOVE AND HATRED LILLA: A PART OF HER LIFE THE RED CROSS BARGE NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE LONELY HOUSE BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES AUTHOR OF “LILLA,” “LOVE AND HATRED,” “GOOD OLD ANNA,” “THE CHINK IN THE ARMOUR,” ETC. NEW [Illustration] YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THE LONELY HOUSE CHAPTER I Lily Fairfield seemed to be rushing along a dark tunnel. It was as if she were being borne on wings. A keen, delicately perfumed air was blowing in her face. Far ahead of her there was a pin-point gleam of bright light—that surely must be the end of the tunnel? But as she swept on and on, farther and farther, the gleam did not grow larger or brighter. It seemed to remain, a white fixed star of light, infinitely far away. Though the experience was intensely vivid, in a sense the girl was conscious that she was experiencing one of the strange, curious dreams, not wholly unpleasant, though sometimes verging on nightmare, which had haunted her at certain intervals during the whole of her not very long life. With dreadful suddenness, out of the dark void above there leapt on her a huge black and white cat. She could see its phosphorescent eyes glaring at her in the darkness; she could feel its stifling weight on her breast. She awoke with a strangled cry—to realise that the nightmare cat had materialised from a book which had fallen out of the net-rack of the swaying French railway carriage in which she was traveling! She looked round her, still a little dazed by her strange dream. And then she grew very pink, for the only other two occupants of the railway carriage were smiling at her broadly. There was unveiled admiration and eager interest in the face of the older man, a middle-aged Frenchman named Hercules Popeau, and a kind of unwilling admiration in that of his companion. And yet Angus Stuart, captain in the London Scottish, was repeating to himself the quaint, moving Scotch phrase, “A guid sight for sair e’en.”