Before I could assess these questions, an aged, leathery English manservant came out of a small closet where I suppose he must have been propped, mummylike, for a decade or so. He began to inch his way up a long staircase.

It was hard to believe that a person so old could move, but I knew the man must be Bertram, and he was. It took him some twenty minutes to complete the ascension of the staircase, and another five or six to inch down the hall to my room, where, to my delight, a steaming bath was waiting.

For an hour I lay in it, soaking away the dust of New Mexico. From time to time a coolie almost as old as Bertram, who looked Egyptian, slipped in with fresh buckets of hot water.

Bertram, meanwhile, inched around the room performing an ancient ritual. He laid out Lord Snow’s evening clothes.

The shoes gave Bertram a huge amount of trouble, I saw. He could scarcely bend to reach them, could scarcely lift them with the heavy shoe trees inside them; he finally did reach them, finally did lift them, but removing the shoe trees from the shoes seemed almost beyond his fading powers.

“Bertram, don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I can easily do that.”

“Well, I can’t easily do it, sir,” Bertram said. “But I shall do it. For if I don’t, Lady Snow will sack me, and then where will I be?”

“I see your point,” I conceded.

It was an easy point to grasp, for all around Winds’ Hill—or Small Alp, if you will—for hundreds of miles lay the unbroken and, I had come to think, deadly, plain. It was a place where an English manservant who must have been in his nineties would be very unlikely to find a new situation.

“Thank you very much, Bertram,” I said, having dried and dressed before he got the shoe trees out of the shoes.

“Not at all, sir,” Bertram said, in a voice that seemed to belong to the days of Prince Albert or some even earlier prince.

Then, at seven-thirty sharp, wearing the very well-made dress clothes of Lord Montstuart Snow, who had been dead for more than twenty years, I went down to dinner.

3.

Dinner was served by Mahmood, the old Egyptian coolie, in a great hall hung with smoky portraits of long-dead Montstuarts or lesser Cavendishes—for the first Lady Snow, Cecily’s mother, was born a Cavendish, though, I believe, from one of the poorer tributaries of Cavendish blood.

We ate on a long cherrywood table from the time of Charles I: Isinglass at one end, Lady Snow at the other, myself more or less at midpoint between them. To my astonishment the first course was terrapin soup.

“Why, this is wonderful soup,” I said, and I meant it. “But where did you get the terrapin?”