Barbara Rebell

As Barbara Rebell, still
Barbara Rebell, though she had been a wife, a most unhappy wife, for six years,
stepped from the small dark vestibule into the dimly-lighted hall of Chancton
Priory, her foot slipped on the floor; and she would have fallen had not a
man's hand, small but curiously bony and fleshless, grasped her right arm,
while, at the same moment, a deep voice from out the darkness exclaimed,
"A good omen! So stumbled the Conqueror!" 

The accent in which the odd
words were uttered would have told a tale as to the speaker's hard-bitten
nationality to most English-speaking folk: not so to the woman to whom they
were addressed. Yet they smote on her ear as though laden with welcome, for
they recalled the voice of a certain Andrew Johnstone, the Scotch Governor of
the West Indian island of Santa Maria, whose brotherly kindness and unobtrusive
sympathy had been more comfortable to her, in a moment of great humiliation and
distress, than his English wife's more openly expressed concern and more
eagerly offered friendship. 

And then,
as the stranger advanced, hesitatingly, into the hall, she found herself
confronted by an odd, indeed an amazing figure, which yet also brought a quick
sense of being at last in a dear familiar place offering both welcome and
shelter. For she was at once aware that this must be the notable Jane Turke,
Madame Sampiero's housekeeper, one to whom Barbara's own mother had often
referred when telling her little daughter of the delights of Chancton Priory—of
the Sussex country house to which, when dying, the thoughts of Richard Rebell's
wife seemed ever turning with sick longing and regret.