He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell
asleep.

Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close
to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the
moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window.
It commanded the avenue and court-yard; but we were many windows removed
from that over the hall-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two
giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove
up the night before.

I saw more clearly in the bright light of morning the signs of neglect and
almost of dilapidation which had struck me as I approached. The court-yard
was tufted over with grass, seldom from year to year crushed by the
carriage-wheels, or trodden by the feet of visitors. This melancholy
verdure thickened where the area was more remote from the centre; and under
the windows, and skirting the walls to the left, was reinforced by a thick
grove of nettles. The avenue was all grass-grown, except in the very
centre, where a narrow track still showed the roadway The handsome carved
balustrade of the court-yard was discoloured with lichens, and in two
places gapped and broken; and the air of decay was heightened by the fallen
trees, among whose sprays and yellow leaves the small birds were hopping.

Before my toilet was completed, in marched my cousin Milly. We were to
breakfast alone that morning, 'and so much the better,' she told me.
Sometimes the Governor ordered her to breakfast with him, and 'never left
off chaffing her' till his newspaper came, and 'sometimes he said such
things he made her cry,' and then he only 'boshed her more,' and packed her
away to her room; but she was by chalks nicer than him, talk as he might.
'_Was_ not she nicer? was not she? was not she?' Upon this point she was so