However, as you will retire directly, it doesn't so much matter." He knocked with his knuckles a thundering reveille that echoed and re-echoed ghostily through the rumbling old house.

In a moment there was a shuffling of footsteps inside, a rattling of a chain, and the noisy undoing of rusty bolts.
"Who's there ?" asked a cracked old voice.

"Is it the young master ?" "Yes, you old idiot! Didn't I send you word?
Open the door at once, and be hanged to you!" A key turned gratingly in the ponderous lock--bolts and chains fell, and the massive door swung back on creaky old hinges.
"Like an ancient castle in a story book," thought Mollie, in the midst of her trouble.

"Where in the wide world am I?
Oh, what an unfortunate little wretch I am! A stolen princess couldn't be abducted and imprisoned oftener." The opening of the door showed a long, black, gloomy entrance hall--bare, bleak and draughty.

Two people stood there--a grizzly old man, stooping, and bleared, and wrinkled, who had opened the door, and a grizzly old woman, just a shade less stooping, and bleared, and wrinkled, who held a sputtering tallow candle aloft.
"How are you, Peter?
How are you, Sally ?" said Mollie's conductor, nodding familiarly to these two antediluvians.