And, standing on the top of the weather-stained, lichen-spotted stone steps, after he had rung the bell, Wolf Solent had time, before anyone answered his ring, to imbibe something of the beauty of this new surrounding. The sky had cleared a little, and from a few open spaces, crowded with small faint stars, a pallid luminosity revealed the outlines of several wide, velvety lawns, intersected by box-hedges, themselves divided by stone-flagged paths. Wolf could see at one end of these lawns a long, high yew-hedge, looking in that uncertain light so mysterious and ill-omened that it was easy to imagine that on the further side of it all manner of phantasmal figures moved, ready to vanish at cockcrow!

For one moment he had a queer sensation that that wretched human face he had seen on the Waterloo steps hung there⁠—there also, between the branches of a tall obscure tree that grew at the end of that yew-hedge. But even as he looked, the face faded; and instead of it, so wrought-upon were his nerves at that moment, there appeared to him the worried, anxious, mackerel-coloured eyes of Darnley Otter.