The Lime Avenue was a dim, if lovely, place at twilight.

When the sun was setting, broad lances of gold slanted through the branches and glorified the green spaces with mellow depths of light.

But later, when the night was drawing in, the lines of grey tree-trunks, shadowed and canopied by boughs, suggested to the mind the pillars of some ruined cathedral, desolate and ghostly.
Jane Cupp, facing the gloom of it during her lady's dinner-hour, and glancing furtively from side to side as she went, would have been awed by the grey stillness, even if she had not been in a timorous mood to begin with.

In the first place, the Lime Avenue, which was her ladyship's own special and favourite walk, was not the usual promenade of serving-maids.

Even the gardeners seldom set foot in it unless to sweep away dead leaves and fallen wood.