The blinds were down.
Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly
bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come
ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the
short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snow track; a quick tinkle
of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
whisper.
My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help
me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary
at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not
like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more
than ten years younger than myself; I had not been--I won't say in that
place, but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet
his guileless physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely
familiar.
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