Lady Gwendolen was as beautiful as usual that evening, but contrary to custom silent and _distraite_. She did not tell the story of the Man in the Park and his dog. She kept it to herself. She was unresponsive to the visible devotion of a Duke's eldest son, who came up to Lutwyche's standard in all particulars. She did not even rise to the enthusiasm of a very old family friend, the great surgeon Sir Coupland Merridew, about the view from his window across the Park, although each had seen the same sunset effect. She only said:--"Oh--have they put you in the Traveller's Room, Sir Coupland? Yes--the view is very fine!" and became absent again. She retired early, asking to be excused on the score of fatigue; not, however, seriously resenting her mother's passing reference to a nursery rhyme about Sleepy-head, whose friends kept late hours, nor her "Why, child, you've had nothing to tire you!" She was asleep in time to avoid the sound of a dog whining, wailing, protesting vainly, with a great wrong on his soul, not to be told for want of language.
She woke with a start very early, to identify this disturbance with something she lost in a dream, past recovery, owing to this sudden awakening. She had her hand on the bell-rope at her bed's head, and had all but pulled it before she identified the blaze of light in her room as the exordium of the new day. The joy of the swallows at the dawn was musical in the ivy round her window, open through the warm night; and the turtle-doves had much to say, and were saying it, in the world of leafage out beyond. But there was no joy in the persistent voice of that dog, and no surmise of its hearer explained it.
She found her feet, and shoes to put them in, before she was clear about her own intentions; then in all haste got herself into as much clothing as would cover the risks of meeting the few early risers possible at such an hour--it could but be some chance groom or that young gardener--and, opening her door with thief-like stealth, stole out through the stillness night had left behind, past the doors of sleepers who were losing the sweetest of the day. So she thought--so we all think--when some chance gives us precious hours that others are wasting in stupid sleep. But even _she_ would not have risen but for that plaintive intermittent wail and a growing construction of a cause for it--all fanciful perhaps--that her uneasy mind would still be at work upon. She _must_ find out the story of it. More sleep now was absurd.