This establishment goes by clockwork.' Mary wished it was a little less like clockwork.

Since Lady Maulevrier had been lying upstairs--the voice which had once ruled over the house muffled almost to dumbness--the monotony of life at Fellside had seemed all the more oppressive.

The servants crept about with stealthier tread.
Mary dared not touch either piano or billiard balls, and was naturally seized with a longing to touch both.

The house had a darkened-look, as if the shadow of doom overhung it.
During this regimen of perfect quiet Lady Maulevrier was not allowed to see the newspapers; and Mary was warned that in reading to her grandmother she was to avoid all exciting topics.

Thus it happened that the account of a terrible collision between the Scotch express and a luggage train, a little way beyond Preston, an accident in which seven people were killed and about thirty seriously hurt, was not made known to her ladyship; and yet that fact would have been of intense interest and significance to her, since one of those passengers whose injuries were fatal bore the name of Louis Asoph..