A cool grotto on a really hot day, the house was an ice-pit on any other; or so Mrs.Woodgate fancied, fresh from the cosey Vicarage, and warm from her rapid walk, as she stepped into another temperature, across polished marble that struck a chill through the soles of her natty brown shoes, and so into the lofty drawing-room with pilasters and elaborate architraves to the doors.

What a place for a sane man to build in bleak old Delverton, even before there was any Northborough to blacken and foul the north-east wind on its way from the sea! What a place for a sane man to buy; and yet, in its cool white smoothness, its glaring individuality, its alien air--how like the buyer! Though it was May, and warm enough for the month and place, Morna got up when the footman had left her, and thrust one brown shoe after the other as near as she could to the wood fire that glimmered underneath the great, ornate, marble mantelpiece.

Then she sat down again, and wondered what to say; for Morna was at once above and below the conversational average of her kind.

Soon she was framing a self-conscious apology for premature intrusion--Mrs.Steel was so long in coming.

But at last there was a rustle in the conservatory, and a slender figure in a big hat stood for an instant on the threshold.
That was Morna's first impression of the new mistress of Normanthorpe, and it was never erased from her mind; a slender silhouette in an enormous hat, the light all behind her, the pilastered doorway for a frame, a gay background of hothouse flowers, and in the figure itself a nervous hesitancy which struck an immediate chord of sympathy in Morna.
She also was shy; the touch of imperfect nature was mutually discernible and discerned; and the two were kin from the meeting of their hands.
Morna began her apology, nevertheless; but Rachel cut it very short.