She began to feel, as she climbed the hill, a good deal of curiosity concerning this Miss Miranda of whom her father had said so much and whom she should have gone to see long ago. Would she be all stiff manners and critical eyes, she wondered, the kind of person to make you feel awkward and tongue-tied the moment you crossed the threshold? It was the feeling that she must be something of the sort that had kept Betsey from coming for all this time. For some distance the lane wound and twisted so that she could not catch any glimpse of the white cottage that she sought. Once she stopped where a side path, a mere rough track bordered by Lombardy poplars, led away to the left. Could that be the way, she wondered, but no, it must lead only to the fields beyond, for here was a heavy white farm horse, evidently just come from plowing, turning into the path through a gap in the hedge. The big creature lifted his feet slowly, seeming comfortably tired after a well-spent day among the furrows, as he trudged leisurely along under the slender shadows of the wet poplar trees. He bore an equally weary rider, a boy of about Elizabeth’s own age, who was perched sideways on the broad back, his legs swinging with every lurch of the horse’s shoulders, his hat held on his knee so that Elizabeth could see plainly his hot, sunburned face and his rumpled, red-brown hair. He did not observe her, for he was looking away across the valley toward that same group of towers that she herself had been watching, as though the distant college held a fascination for him as well as for her. She thought for a moment of waiting to ask him the way, but her eye caught sight, just then, of a green roof above her among the trees and she went onward. As she opened the gate beside the lane and walked up the path to the house, she felt, almost in spite of herself, an immediate liking for the place. It was a tiny white cottage with a wide-eaved roof, with two big red brick chimneys that told of broad hearthstones inside, with swinging windows and clambering vines and a square lawn skirted at one side by a high stone wall. Beyond this wall she could see again the blackened ruins that had aroused her curiosity as she sat at the crossroads below. What a wide and stately house it must have been there at the top of the hill and how strange it was that it had never been rebuilt! She must be sure to ask Miss Reynolds about it, for there was, somehow, a spell of haunting mystery about those roofless walls and empty windows that seemed to stare away across the wide view spread out below them. There was time for her to observe all these things as she stood upon the doorstep for, although she rang the bell twice, no one came to admit her. “I don’t want to come all this way for nothing,” she thought; “I will go to the side door and find some way of leaving word that I have been here.”