Chapter 21 - Page 2

England at least,--
and whose story was left so ragged and questionable even by all that he
could add.

Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep home-
feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever, he
should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness, a
struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last,
established at his temporary home in the place that he had so long
looked forward to, and that this was the moment which he would have
thought more interesting than any other in his life. He was strangely
cold and indifferent, frozen up as it were, and fancied that he would
have cared little had he been to leave the mansion without so much as
looking over the remaining part of it.

At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor
of indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of
finding his way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that
delightful intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained by
design; but is the happy result of where many builders, many designs,--
many ages, perhaps,--have concurred in a structure, each pursuing his
own design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray in, as in a
city, and come to unexpected places, but never, until after much
accustomance, go where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great
staircase and wide corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed
easy to find, yet soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown
labyrinth, where strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and
where passages promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing.
To be sure, the old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of
one of Mrs. Radcliffe's castles, with their suites of rooms opening one
into another; but yet its very domesticity--its look as if long ago it
had been lived in--made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt
the more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of
the ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice
echoed along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but
arousing nobody. It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but
were bewildered round and round, within a very small compass; a
predicament in which a man feels very foolish usually.

As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a
personage looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of
great keenness and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though
dark and sallow. The dress had something which