It must have been the incomparable charm of the
woman. She had come, this night, luminously, it seemed to us,
through the haze that had been on her - the smoke haze of a
strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been carried
along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ancient Major
Carrington and I.
He turned back in the road, his decayed voice whipped by the
stimulus of her into a higher note.
"Suppose the village coachman should think her as lovely as we do
- what!"
He laughed and turned heavily up the road a hundred yards or so
to his cottage set in the pine wood. I stood in the road
watching the wheels of the absurd village vehicle, the yellow
cut-under, disappear. The old Major called back to me; his voice
seemed detached, eerie with the thin laugh in it.
"I thought him a particularly villainous-looking creature!"
It was an absurd remark. The man was one of the natives of the
island, and besides, the innkeeper was a person of sound sense;
he would know precisely about his driver.
I should not have gone on this adventure but for a further
incident.
When I entered the house my sister was going up the stair, the
butler was beyond in the drawing-room, and there was no other
servant visible.
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