The vision of the limousine at her command seemed to have come partly true as a trim chauffeur stepped up to her in the station at Marillo, touching his cap and asking if he spoke to Miss Follett. He touched his cap again when he closed the door on her, and the car tooled away along a road which bore the same relation to the roads with which Jennie was familiar as a glorified spirit to a living man.
The park was not so much a park as it was a country. It had hills, valleys, landscapes, lakes, and what seemed to Jennie immense estates for which there was plenty of room. There were houses as big as hotels and much more beautiful. Trees, flowers, lawns, terraces, fountains, tennis courts, dogs, horses, and motor cars were as silver in the building of the Temple of Jerusalem--nothing accounted of. Jennie had seen high life as lived by the motion-picture heroine, but she had not believed that even wealth could buy such a Garden of Eden as this. Expecting to reach Collingham Lodge a few minutes after passing the grille, she had gone on and on, over roads that branched, and then branched, and then branched again, like the veinings of a leaf.
After descending at the white-columned portico, she went up the steps in a state bordering on trance. She knew what to do much as Elijah, having come by the chariot of fire to another plane of life, must have known what to do when required to get out and go onward. Since a man in livery opened a door of wrought-iron tracery over glass, she had no choice but to pass through.
It is possible that Max, by his supersenses, knew that she belonged to his master, for, springing toward her, he nosed her hand. It was, as she put it to herself, the only human touch in the first stages of her welcome. Thenceforward, during all the forty or fifty minutes of her stay, he kept close to her, either on foot or crouched beside her chair, till a curious thing happened when she regained the car.
I have said in the first stages of her welcome, for as soon as she entered the hall she heard a cheery voice.
"Oh, so it's you, Miss Follett! So glad you've come. It's really too bad to bring you so far--only, it seemed to me we might be cozier here than if I went up to town."