'And may the Lord have mercy on my soul!' uttered a stifled, unfamiliar voice from the bed. Mrs Lawford stooped. 'Arthur!' she cried faintly, 'Arthur!'

Lawford raised himself on his elbow with a sigh that was very near to being a sob. 'Oh, Sheila, if you'd only be your real self! What is the use of all this pretence? Just consider MY position a little. The fear and horror are not all on your side. You called me Arthur even then. I'd willingly do anything you wish to save you pain; you know that. Can't we be friends even in this—this ghastly—Won't you, Sheila?'

Mrs Lawford drew back, struggling with a doubtful heart.

'I think,' she said, 'it would be better not to discuss that now.'

The rest of the morning Lawford remained in solitude.



CHAPTER SIX

There were three books in the room—Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying,' a volume of the Quiver, and a little gilded book on wildflowers. He read in vain. He lay and listened to the uproar of his thoughts on which an occasional sound—the droning of a fly, the cry of a milkman, the noise of a passing van—obtruded from the workaday world. The pale gold sunlight edged softly over the bed. He ate up everything on his tray. He even, on the shoals of nightmare, dreamed awhile. But by and by as the hours wheeled slowly on he grew less calm, less strenuously resolved on lying there inactive. Every sparrow that twittered cried reveille through his brain. He longed with an ardour strange to his temperament to be up and doing.

What if his misfortune was, as he had in the excitement of the moment suggested to Sheila, only a morbid delusion of mind; shared too in part by sheer force of his absurd confession? Even if he was going mad, who knows how peaceful a release that might not be? Could his shrewd old vicar have implicitly believed in him if the change were as complete as he supposed it? He flung off the bedclothes and locked the door. He dressed himself, noticing, he fancied, with a deadly revulsion of feeling, that his coat was a little too short in the sleeves, his waistcoat too loose. In the midst of his dressing came Sheila bringing his luncheon. 'I'm sorry,' he called out, stooping quickly beside the bed, 'I can't talk now. Please put the tray down.'

About half an hour afterwards he heard the outer door close, and peeping from behind the curtains saw his wife go out. All was drowsily quiet in the house. He devoured his lunch like a schoolboy. That finished to the last crumb, without a moment's delay he covered his face with a towel, locked the door behind him, put the key in his pocket, and ran lightly downstairs. He stuffed the towel into an ulster pocket, put on a soft, wide-brimmed hat, and noiselessly let himself out. Then he turned with an almost hysterical delight and ran—ran like the wind, without pausing, without thinking, straight on, up one turning, down another, until he reached a broad open common, thickly wooded, sprinkled with gorse and hazel and may, and faintly purple with fading heather. There he flung himself down in the beautiful sunlight, among the yellowing bracken, to recover his breath.

He lay there for many minutes, thinking almost with composure. Flight, it seemed, had for the moment quietened the demands of that other feebly struggling personality which was beginning to insinuate itself into his consciousness, which had so miraculously broken in and taken possession of his body. He would not think now. All he needed was a little quiet and patience before he threw off for good and all his right to be free, to be his own master, to call himself sane.

He scrambled up and turned his face towards the westering sun. What was there in the stillness of its beautiful splendour that seemed to sharpen his horror and difficulty, and yet to stir him to such a daring and devilry as he had never known since he was a boy? There was little sound of life; somewhere an unknown bird was singing, and a few late bees were droning in the bracken. All these years he had, like an old blind horse, stolidly plodded round and round in a dull self-set routine. And now, just when the spirit had come for rebellion, the mood for a harmless truancy, there had fallen with them too this hideous enigma. He sat there with the dusky silhouette of the face that was now drenched with sunlight in his mind's eye. He set off again up the stony incline.

Why not walk on and on? In time real wholesome weariness would come; he could sleep at ease in some pleasant wayside inn, without once meeting the eyes that stood as it were like a window between himself and a shrewd incredulous scoffing world that would turn him into a monstrosity and his story into a fable. And in a little while, perhaps in three days, he would awaken out of this engrossing nightmare, and know he was free, this black dog gone from his back, and (as the old saying expressed it without any one dreaming what it really meant) his own man again. How astonished Sheila would be; how warmly she would welcome him!... Oh yes, of course she would.

He came again to a standstill. No voice answered him out of that illimitable gold and blue. Nothing seemed aware of him. But as he stood there, doubtful as Cain on the outskirts of the unknown, he caught the sound of a footfall on the lonely and stone-strewn path.

The ground sloped steeply away to the left, and slowly mounting the hillside came mildly on an old lady he knew, a Miss Sinnet, an old friend of his mother's. There was just such a little seat as that other he knew so well, on the brow of the hill. He made his way to it, intending to sit quietly there until the little old lady had passed by. Up and up she came. Her large bonnet appeared, and then her mild white face, inclined a little towards him as she ascended. Evidently this very seat was her goal; and evasion was impossible. Evasion!... Memory rushed back and set his pulses beating. He turned boldly to the sun, and the old lady, with a brief glance into his face, composed herself at the other end of the little seat. She gazed out of a gentle reverie into the golden valley. And so they sat a while. And almost as if she had felt the bond of acquaintance between them, she presently sighed, and addressed him: 'A very, very, beautiful view, sir.'

Lawford paused, then turned a gloomy, earnest face, gilded with sunshine. 'Beautiful, indeed,' he said, 'but not for me. No, Miss Sinnet, not for me.'

The old lady gravely turned and examined the aquiline profile. 'Well, I confess,' she remarked urbanely, 'you have the advantage of me.'

Lawford smiled uneasily. 'Believe me, it is little advantage.'

'My sight,' said Miss Sinnet precisely, 'is not so good as I might wish; though better perhaps than I might have hoped; I fear I am not much wiser; your face is still unfamiliar to me.'

'It is not unfamiliar to me,' said Lawford. Whose trickery was this? he thought, putting such affected stuff into his mouth.

A faint lightening of pity came into the silvery and scrupulous countenance. 'Ah, dear me, yes,' she said courteously.

Lawford rested a lean hand on the seat. 'And have you,' he asked, 'not the least recollection in the world of my face?'

'Now really,' she said, smiling blandly, 'is that quite fair? Think of all the scores and scores of faces in seventy long years; and how very treacherous memory is. You shall do me the service of REMINDING me of one whose name has for the moment escaped me.'

'I am the son of a very old friend of yours, Miss Sinnet,' said Lawford quietly 'a friend that was once your schoolfellow at Brighton.'

'Well, now,' said the old lady, grasping her umbrella, 'that is undoubtedly a clue; but then, you see, all but one of the friends of my girlhood are dead; and if I have never had the pleasure of meeting her son, unless there is a decided resemblance, how am I to recollect HER by looking at HIM?'

'There is, I believe, a likeness,' said Lawford.

She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. 'You are insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last to leave me was Fanny Urquhart, that was—let me see—last October. Now you are certainly not Fanny Urquhart's son,' she stooped austerely, 'for she never had one. Last year, too, I heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson was dead. HER I hadn't met for many, many years. But, if I may venture to say so, yours is not a Scottish face; and she not only married a Scottish husband, but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at a loss.'

A miserable strife was in her chance companion's mind, a strife of anger and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the fast declining sun. 'You will forgive my persistency, but I assure you it is a matter of life or death to me. Is there no one my face recalls? My voice?'

Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with the faintest perturbation. 'But he certainly knows my name,' she said to herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal beauty, beneath that pale blue arch of evening, these two human beings confronted one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet with a certain grave directness.

'I don't really think,' she said, 'you can be Mary Lawford's son. I could scarcely have mistaken HIM.'

Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught even the echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became confused as if in the tumult of a struggle. He heard himself expostulate, 'Ah, Miss Bennett, I fear I set you too difficult a task.'

The old lady drew abruptly in, like a trustful and gentle snail into its shocked house. 'Bennett, sir; but my name is not Bennett.'

And again Lawford accepted the miserable prompting. 'Not Bennett!... How can I ever then apologise for so frantic a mistake?'

The little old lady took firm hold of her umbrella. She did not answer him. 'The likeness, the likeness!' he began unctuously, and stopped, for the glance that dwelt fleetingly on him was cold with the formidable dignity and displeasure of age. He raised his hat and turned miserably home. He strode on out of the last gold into the blue twilight. What fantastic foolery of mind was mastering him? He cast a hurried look over his shoulder at the kindly and offended old figure sitting there, solitary, on the little seat, in her great bonnet, with back turned resolutely upon him—the friend of his dead mother who might have proved in his need a friend indeed to him. And he had by this insane caprice hopelessly estranged her.

She would remember this face well enough now, he thought bitterly, and would take her place among his quiet enemies, if ever the day of reckoning should come. It was scandalous, it was banal to have abused her trust and courtesy. Oh, it was hopeless to struggle any more! The fates were against him. They had played him a trick. He was to be their transitory sport, as many a better man he could himself recollect had been before him. He would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him what she pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane.

He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in repeating so successful a stratagem.

Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some old keepsake of his mother's. What would he not do when the old moods and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so little and so superficially, came back to him.

He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket, chilled and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there, dazed and still, beneath the dim yellow of his own fanlight; and once again that inward spring flew back. 'Brazen it out; brazen it out! Knock and ring!'

He knocked flamboyantly, and rang.

There came a quiet step and the door opened. 'Dr Simon, of course, has called?' he inquired suavely.

'Yes, sir.'

'Ah, and gone'—as I feared. And Mrs Lawford?'

'I think Mrs Lawford is in, sir.'

Lawford put out a detaining hand. 'We will not disturb her; we will not disturb her. I can find my way up; oh yes, thank you!'

But Ada still palely barred the way. 'I think, sir,' she said, 'Mrs Lawford would prefer to see you herself; she told me most particularly "all callers." And Mr Lawford was not to be disturbed on any account.'

'Disturbed? God forbid!' said Lawford, but his dark eyes failed to move these lightest hazel. 'Well,' he continued nonchalantly, 'perhaps—perhaps it—WOULD be as well if Mrs Lawford should know that I am here. No, thank you, I won't come in. Please go and tell—' But even as the maid turned to obey, Sheila herself appeared at the dining-room door in hat and veil.

Lawford hesitated an immeasurable moment. In one swift glance he perceived the lamplit mystery of evening, beckoning, calling, pleading—Fly, fly! Home's here for you. Begin again, begin again. And there before him in quiet and hostile decorum stood maid and mistress. He took off his hat and stepped quickly in.

'So late, so very late, I fear,' he began glibly. 'A sudden call, a perfectly impossible distance. Shall we disturb him, do you think?'

'Wouldn't it,' began Sheila softly, 'be rather a pity perhaps? Dr Simon seemed to think.... But, of course, you must decide that.'

Ada turned quiet small eyes.

'No, no, by no means,' he almost mumbled.

And a hard, slow smile passed over Sheila's face. 'Excuse me one moment,' she said; 'I will see if he is awake.' She swept swiftly forward, superb and triumphant, beneath the gaze of those dark, restless eyes. But so still was home and street that quite distinctly a clear and youthful laughter was heard, and light footsteps approaching. Sheila paused. Ada, in the act of closing the door, peered out. 'Miss Alice, ma'am,' she said.

And in this infinitesimal advantage of time Dr Ferguson had seized his vanishing opportunity, and was already swiftly mounting the stairs. Mrs Lawford stood with veil half raised and coldly smiling lips and, as if it were by pre-arrangement, her daughter's laughing greeting from the garden, and from the landing above her, a faint 'Ah, and how are we now?' broke out simultaneously. And Ada, silent and discreet, had thrown open the door again to the twilight and to the young people ascending the steps.

Lawford was still sitting on his bed before a cold and ashy hearth when Sheila knocked at the door.

'Yes?' he said; 'who's there?' No answer followed. He rose with a shuddering sigh and turned the key. His wife entered.

'That little exhibition of finesse was part of our agreement, I suppose?'

'I say—' began Lawford.

'To creep out in my absence like a thief, and to return like a mountebank; that was part of our compact?'

'I say,' he stubbornly began again, 'did you wire for Alice?'

'Will you please answer my question? Am I to be a mere catspaw in your intrigues, in this miserable masquerade before the servants? To set the whole place ringing with the name of a doctor that doesn't exist, and a bedridden patient that slips out of the house with his bedroom key in his pocket! Are you aware that Ada has been hammering at your door every half-hour of your absence? Are you aware of that? How much,' she continued in a low, bitter voice, 'how much should I offer for her discretion?'

'Who was that with Alice?' inquired the same toneless voice.

'I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to be made a child of. Will you please answer me?'

Lawford turned. 'Look here, Sheila,' he began heavily, 'what about Alice? If you wired: well, it's useless to say anything more. But if you didn't, I ask you just this one thing. Don't tell her!'

'Oh, I perfectly appreciate a father's natural anxiety.'

Her husband drew up his shoulders as if to receive a blow. 'Yes, yes,' he said, 'but you won't?'

The sound of a young laughing voice came faintly up from below. 'How did Jimmie Fortescue know she was coming home to-day?'

'Will you not inquire of Jimmie Fortescue for yourself?'

'Oh, what is the use of sneering?' began the dull voice again. 'I am horribly tired, Sheila. And try how you will, you can't convince me that you believe for a moment that I am not myself, that you are as hard as you pretend. An acquaintance, even a friend might be deceived; but husband and wife—oh no! It isn't only a man's face that's himself—or even his hands.' He looked at them, straightened them slowly out, and buried them in his pockets. 'All I care about now is Alice. Is she, or is she not going to be told? I am simply asking you to give her just a chance.'

'"Simply asking me to give Alice a chance"; now isn't that really just a little...?'

Lawford slowly shook his head. 'You know in your heart it isn't, Sheila; you understand me quite well, although you persistently pretend not to. I can't argue now. I can't speak up for myself. I am just about as far down as I can go. It's only Alice.'

'I see; a lucid interval?' suggested his wife in a low, trembling voice.

'Yes, yes, if you like,' said her husband patiently, '"a lucid interval." Don't please look at my face like that, Sheila. Think—think that it's just lupus, just some horrible disfigurement.'

Not much light was in the large room, and there was something so extraordinarily characteristic of her husband in those stooping shoulders, in the head hung a little forward, and in the preternaturally solemn voice, that Sheila had to bend a little over the bed to catch a glimpse of the sallow and keener face again. She sighed; and even on her own strained ear her sigh sounded almost like one of relief.

'It's useless, I know, to ask you anything while you are in this mood,' continued Lawford dully; 'I know that of old.'

The white, ringed hands clenched, '"Of old!"'

'I didn't mean anything. Don't listen to what I say. It's only—it's just Alice knowing, that was all; I mean at once.'

'Don't for a moment suppose I am not perfectly aware that it is only Alice you think of. You were particularly anxious about my feelings, weren't you? You broke the news to me with the tenderest solicitude. I am glad our—our daughter shares my husband's love.'

'Look here,' said Lawford densely, 'you know that I love you as much as ever; but with this—as I am; what would be the good of my saying so?' Mrs Lawford took a deep breath.

And a voice called softly at the door, 'Mother, are you there? Is father awake? May I come in?'

In a flash the memory returned to her; twenty-four hours ago she was asking that very question of this unspeakable figure that sat hunched-up before her.

'One moment, dear,' she called. And added in a very low voice, 'Come here!'

Lawford looked up. 'What?' he said.

'Perhaps, perhaps,' she whispered, 'it isn't quite so bad.'

'For mercy's sake, Sheila,' he said, 'don't torture me; tell the poor child to go away.'

She paused. 'Are you there, Alice? Would you mind, father says, waiting a little? He is so very tired.'

'Too tired to.... Oh, very well, mother.'

Mrs Lawford opened the door, and called after her, 'Is Jimmie gone?'

'Oh, yes, hours.'

'Where did you meet?'

'I couldn't get a carriage at the station. He carried my dressing-bag; I begged him not to. The other's coming on. You know what Jimmie is. How very, very lucky I did come home. I don't know what made me; just an impulse; they did laugh at me so. Father dear—do speak to me; how are you now?'

Lawford opened his mouth, gulped, and shook his head.

'Ssh, dear!' whispered Sheila, 'I think he has fallen asleep. I will be down in a minute.' Mrs Lawford was about to close the door when Ada appeared.

'If you please, ma'am,' she said, 'I have been waiting, as you told me, to let Dr Ferguson out, but it's nearly seven now; and the table's not laid yet.'

'I really should have thought, Ada,' Sheila began, then caught back the angry words, and turned and looked over her shoulder into the room. 'Do you think you will need anything more, Dr Ferguson?' she asked in a sepulchral voice.

Again Lawford's lips moved; again he shook his head.

'One moment, Ada,' she said closing the door. 'Some more medicine—what medicine? Quick! She mustn't suspect.'

'"What medicine?"' repeated Lawford stolidly.

'Oh, vexing, vexing; don't you see we must send her out? Don't you see? What was it you sent to Critchett's for last night? Tell him that's gone: we want more of that.'

Lawford stared heavily. Oh, yes, yes,' he said thickly, 'more of that....'

Sheila, with a shrug of extreme distaste and vexation, hastily opened the door. 'Dr Ferguson wants a further supply of the drug which Mr Critchett made up for Mr Lawford yesterday evening. You had better go at once, Ada, and please make as much haste as you possibly can.'

'I say, I say,' began Lawford; but it was too late, the door was shut.

'How I detest this wretched falsehood and subterfuge. What could have induced you....?'

'Yes,' said her husband, 'what! I think I'll be getting to bed again, Sheila; I forgot I had been ill. And now I do really feel very tired. But I should like to feel—in spite of this hideous—I should like to feel we are friends, Sheila.'

Sheila almost imperceptibly shuddered, crossed the room, and faced the still, almost lifeless mask. 'I spoke,' she said, in a low, cold, difficult voice—'I spoke in a temper this morning. You must try to understand what a shock it has been to me. Now, I own it frankly, I know you are—Arthur. But God only knows how it frightens me, and—and—horrifies me.' She shut her eyes beneath her veil. They waited on in silence a while.

'Poor boy!' she said at last, lightly touching the loose sleeve; 'be brave; it will all come right, soon. Meanwhile, for Alice's sake, if not for mine, don't give way to—to caprices, and all that. Keep quietly here, Arthur. And—and forgive my impatience.'

He put out his hand as if to touch her. 'Forgive you!' he said humbly, pushing it stubbornly back into his pocket again. 'Oh, Sheila, the forgiveness is all on your side. You know I have nothing to forgive.' A long silence fell between them.

'Then, to-night,' at last began Sheila wearily, drawing back, 'we say nothing to Alice, except that you are too tired—just nervous prostration—to see her. What we should do without this influenza, I cannot conceive. Mr Bethany will probably look in on his way home; and then we can talk it over—we can talk it over again. So long as you are like this, yourself, in mind, why I—What is it now?' she broke off querulously.

'If you please, ma'am, Mr Critchett says he doesn't know Dr Ferguson, his name's not in the Directory, and there must be something wrong with the message, and he's sorry, but he must have it in writing because there was more even in the first packet than he ought by rights to send. What shall I do, if you please?'

Still looking at her husband. Sheila listened quietly to the end, and then, as if in inarticulate disdain, she deliberately shrugged her shoulders, and went out to play her part unaided.



CHAPTER SEVEN

Her husband turned wearily once more, and drawing up a chair sat down in front of the cold grate. He realised that Sheila thought him as much of a fool now as she had for the moment thought him an impostor, or something worse, the night before. That was at least something gained. He realised, too, in a vague way that the exuberance of mind that had practically invented Dr Ferguson, and outraged Miss Sinnet, had quite suddenly flickered out. It was astonishing, he thought, with gaze fixed innocently on the black coals, that he should ever have done such things. He detested that kind of 'rot'; that jaunty theatrical pose so many men prided their jackdaw brains on.

And he sat quite still, like a cat at a cranny, listening, as it were, for the faintest remotest stir that might hint at any return of this—activity. It was the first really sane moment he had had since the 'change.' Whatever it was that had happened at Widderstone was now distinctly weakening in effect. Why, now, perhaps? He stole a thievish look over his shoulder at the glass, and cautiously drew finger and thumb down that beaked nose. Then he really quietly smiled, a smile he felt this abominable facial caricature was quite unused to, the superior Lawford smile of guileless contempt for the fanatical, the fantastic, and the bizarre: He wouldn't have sat with his feet on the fender before a burnt-out fire.

And the animosity of that 'he,' uttered only just under his breath, surprised even himself. It actually did seem as if there were a chance; if only he kept cool and collected. If the whole mind of a man was bent on being one thing, surely no power on earth, certainly not on earth, could for long compel him to look another, any more (followed the resplendent thought) than vice versa.

That, in fact, was the trick that had been in fitful fashion played him since yesterday. Obviously, and apart altogether from his promise to Sheila, the best possible thing he could do would be to walk quietly over to Widderstone to-morrow and like a child that has lost a penny, just make the attempt to reverse the process: look at the graves, read the inscriptions on the weather-beaten stones, compose himself once more to sleep on the little seat.

Magic, witchcraft, possession, and all that—well, Mr Bethany might prefer to take it on the authority of the Bible if it was his duty. But it was at least mainly Old Testament stuff, like polygamy, Joshua, and the 'unclean beasts.' The 'unclean beasts.' It was simply, as Simon had said, mainly an affair of the nerves, like Indian jugglery. He had heard of dozens of such cases, or similar cases. And it was hardly likely that cases even remotely like his own would be much bragged about, or advertised. All those mysterious 'disappearances,' too, which one reads about so repeatedly? What of them? Even now, he felt (and glanced swiftly behind him at the fancy), it would be better to think as softly as possible, not to hope too openly, certainly not to triumph in the least degree, just in case of—well—listeners.

He would wrap up too. And he wouldn't tell Sheila of the project till he had come safely back. What an excellent joke it would be to confess meekly to his escapade, and to be scolded, and then suddenly to reveal himself. He sat back and gazed with an almost malignant animosity at the face in the portrait, comely and plump.

An inarticulate, unfathomable depression rolled back on him, like a mist out of the sea. He hastily undressed, put watch and door-key and Critchett's powder under his pillow, paused, vacantly ruminated, and then replaced the powder in his waistcoat pocket, said his prayers, and got shivering to bed. He did not feel hurt at Sheila's leaving him like this. So long as she really believed in him. And now—Alice was home. He listened, trying not to shiver, for her voice; and sometimes heard, he fancied, the clear note. It was this beastly influenza that made him feel so cold and lifeless. But all would soon come right—that is, if only that face, luminous against the floating darkness within, would not appear the instant he closed his eyes.

But legions of dreams are Influenza's allies. He fell into a chill doze, heard voices innumerable, and one above the rest, shouting them down, until there fell a lull. And another, as it were, from afar said quite clearly and distinctly, 'But surely, my dear, you have heard the story of the poor old charwoman who talked Greek in her delirium? A little school French need not alarm us.' And Lawford opened his eyes again on Mr Bethany standing at his bed.

'Tt, tt! There, I've been and waked him. And yet they say men make such excellent nurses in time of war. But you see, Lawford, what did I tell you? Wasn't I now an infallible prophet? Your wife has been giving me a most glowing account. Quite your old self, she tells me, except for just this—this touch of facial paralysis. And I think, do you know' (the kind old creature stooped over the bed, but still, Lawford noticed bitterly, still without his spectacles)—'yes, I really think there is a decided improvement. Not quite so—drawn. We must make haste slowly. Wedderburn, you know, believes profoundly in Simon; he pulled his wife through a dangerous confinement. And here's pills and tonics and liniments—a whole chemist's shop. Oh, we are getting on swimmingly.'

Flamelight was flickering in the candled dusk. Lawford turned his head and saw Sheila's coiled, beautiful hair in the firelight.

'You haven't told Alice?' he asked.

'My dear good man,' said Mr Bethany, 'of course we haven't. You shall tell her yourself on Monday. What an incredible tradition it will be! But you mustn't worry; you mustn't even think. And no more of these jaunts, eh? That Ferguson business—that was too bad. What are we going to do with the fellow now we have created him? He will come home to roost—mark my words. And as likely as not down the Vicarage chimney. I wouldn't have believed it of you, my dear fellow.' He beamed, but looked, none the less, very lean and fagged and depressed.

'How did the wedding go off?' Lawford managed to think of inquiring.

'Oh, A1,' said Mr Bethany. 'I've just been describing it to Alice—the bride, her bridegroom, mother, aunts, cake, presents, finery, blushes, tears, and everything that was hers. We've been in fits, haven't we, Mrs Lawford? And Alice says I'm a Worth in a clerical collar—didn't she? And that it's only Art that has kept me out of an apron. Now look here; quiet, quiet, quiet; no excitement, no pranks. What is there to worry about, pray? And now Little Dorrit's down with influenza too. And Craik and I will have double work to do. Well, well; good-bye, my dear. God bless you, Lawford. I can't tell you how relieved, how unspeakably relieved I am to find you so much—so much better. Feed him up, my other dear; body and mind and soul and spirit. And there goes the bell. I must have a biscuit. I've swallowed nothing but a Cupid in plaster of Paris since breakfast. Goodnight; we shall miss you both—both.'

But when Sheila returned, her husband was sunk again into a quiet sleep, from which not even the many questions she fretted to put to him seemed weighty enough to warrant his disturbance.

So when Lawford again opened his eyes he found himself lying wide awake, clear and refreshed, and eager to get up. But upon the air lay the still hush of early morning. He tried in vain to catch back sleep again. A distant shred of dream still floated in his mind, like a cloud at evening. He rarely dreamed, but certainly something immensely interesting had but a moment ago eluded him. He sat up and looked at the clear red cinders and their maze of grottoes. He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquillity hung the morning star, and rose, rifling into the dusk of night, the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.

Hardly since childhood had Lawford seen the dawn unless over his winter breakfast-table. Very much like a child now he stood gazing out of his bow-window—the child whom Time's busy robins had long ago covered over with the leaves of numberless hours. A vague exultation fumed up into his brain. Still on the borders of sleep, he unlocked the great wardrobe and took out an old faded purple and crimson dressing-gown that had belonged to his grandfather, the chief glory of every Christmas charade. He pulled the cowl-like hood over his head and strode majestically over to the looking-glass.

He looked in there a moment on the strange face, like a child dismayed at its own excitement, and a fit of sobbing that was half uncontrollable laughter swept over him. He threw off the hood and turned once more to the window. Consciousness had flooded back indeed. What would Sheila have said to see him there? The unearthly beauty and stillness, and man's small labours, garden and wall and roof-tree idle and smokeless in the light of daybreak—there seemed to be some half-told secret between them. What had life done with him to leave a reality so clouded? He put on his slippers, and, gently opening the door, crept with extreme caution up the stairs. At a long, narrow landing window he confronted a panorama of starry night-gardens, sloping orchards; and beyond them fields, hills, Orion, the Dogs, in the clear and cloudless darkness.

'My God, how beautiful!' a voice whispered. And a cock crowed mistily afar. He stood staring like a child into the wintry brightness of a pastry-cook's. Then once more he crept stealthily on. He stooped and listened at a closed door, until he fancied that above the beating of his own heart he could hear the breathing of the sleeper within. Then, taking firm hold of the handle with both hands, he slowly noiselessly turned it, and peeped in on Alice.

The moon was long past her faint shining here. The blind was down. And yet it was not pitch dark. He stood with eyes fixed, waiting. Then he edged softly forward and knelt down beside the bed. He could hear her breathing now: long, low, quiet, unhastening—the miracle of life. He could just dimly discern the darkness of her hair against the pillow. Some long-sealed spring of tenderness seemed to rise in his heart with a grief and an ache he had never known before. Here at least he could find a little peace, a brief pause, however futile and stupid all his hopes of the night had been. He leant his head on his hands on the counterpane and refused to think. He felt a quick tremor, a startled movement, and knew that eyes wide open with fear were striving to pierce the gloom between them.

'There, there, dearest,' he said in a low whisper, 'it's only me, only me.' He stroked the narrow hand and gazed into the shadowiness. Her fingers lay quiet and passive in his, with that strange sense of immateriality that sleep brings to the body.

'You, you!' she answered with a deep sigh. 'Oh, dearest, how you frightened me. What is wrong? why have you come? Are you worse, dearest, dearest?'

He kissed her hand. 'No, Alice, not worse. I couldn't sleep, that was all.'

'Oh, and I came so utterly miserable to bed because you would not see me. And Mother would tell me only so very little. I didn't even know you had been ill.' She pressed his hand between her own. 'But this, you know, is very, very naughty—you will catch cold, you bad thing. What would Mother say?'

'I think we mustn't tell her, dear. I couldn't help it; I felt much I wanted to see you. I have been rather miserable.'

'Why?' she said, stroking his hand from wrist to fingertips with one soft finger. 'You mustn't be miserable. You and me have never done such a thing before; have we? Was it that wretched old Flu?'

It was too dark in the little fragrant room even to see her face so close to his own. And yet he feared. 'Dr Simon,' she went on softly, 'said it was. But isn't your voice a little hoarse, and it sounds so melancholy in the dark. And oh'—she squeezed his wrist—'you have grown so thin! You do frighten me. Whatever should I do if you were really ill? And it was so odd, dear. When first I woke I seemed to be still straining my eyes in a dream, at such a curious, haunting face—not very nice. I am glad, I am glad you were here.'

'What was the dream-face like?' came the muttered question.

'Dark and sharp, and rather dwelling eyes; you know those long faces one sees in dreams: like a hawk, like a conjuror's.'

Like a conjuror's!—it was the first unguarded and ungarbled criticism. 'Perhaps, dear, if you find my voice different, and my hand shrunk up, you will find my face changed, too—like a conjuror's.... What then?'

She laughed gaily and tenderly. 'You silly silly; I should love you more than ever. Your hands are icy cold. I can't warm them nohow.'

Lawford held tight his daughter's hand. 'You do love me, Alice? You would not turn against me, whatever happened? Ah, you shall see, you shall see.' A sudden burning hope sprang up in him. Surely when all was well again, these last few hours would not have been spent in vain. Like the shadow of death they had been, against whose darkness the green familiar earth seems beautiful as the plains of paradise. Had he but realized before how much he loved her—what years of life had been wasted in leaving it all unsaid! He came back from his reverie to find his hand wet with her tears. He stroked her hair, and touched gently her eyelids without speaking.

'You will let me come in to-morrow?' she pleaded; 'you won't keep me out?'

'Ah, but, dear, you must remember your mother. She gets so anxious, and every word the doctor says is law. How would you like me to come again like this, perhaps?—like Santa Claus?'

'You know how I love having you,' she said, and stopped. 'But—but...' He leaned closer. 'Yes, yes, come,' she said, clutching his hand and hiding her eyes; 'it is only my dream—that horrible, dwelling face in the dream; it frightened me so.'

Lawford rose very slowly from his knees. He could feel in the dark his brows drawn down; there came a low, sullen beating on his ear; he saw his face as it were in dim outline against the dark. Rage and rebellion surged up in him; even his love could be turned to bitterness. Well, two could play at any game! Alice sprang up in bed and caught his sleeve. 'Dearest, dearest, you must not be angry with me now!'

He flung himself down beside the bed. Anger, resentment died away. 'You are all I have left,' he said.

He stole back, as he had come, in the clear dawn to his bedroom.

It was not five yet. He put a few more coals on his fire and blew out the night-light, and lay down. But it was impossible to rest, to remain inactive. He would go down and search for that first volume of Quain. Hallucination, Influenza, Insanity—why, Sheila must have purposely mislaid it. A rather formidable figure he looked, descending the stairs in the grey dusk of daybreak. The breakfast-room was at the back of the house. He tilted the blind, and a faint light flowed in from the changing colours of the sky. He opened the glass door of the little bookcase to the right of the window, and ran eye and finger over the few rows of books. But as he stood there with his back to the room, just as the shadow of a bird's wing floats across the moonlight of a pool, he became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed across the doorway, and in passing had looked in on him.

He stood motionless, listening; but no sound broke the morning slumbrousness, except the faraway warbling of a thrush in the first light. So sudden and transitory had been the experience that it seemed now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up, it had with so furtive and sinister a quietness broken in on his solitude, that for a moment he dared not move. A cold, indefinite sensation stole over him that he was being watched; that some dim, evil presence was behind him biding its time, patient and stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where he stood. But, watch and wait as silently as he might, only the day broadened at the window, and at last a narrow ray of sunlight stole trembling up into the dusky bowl of the sky.

At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to I; and Lawford turned back to his bondage with the book under his arm.



CHAPTER EIGHT

The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming bells, had passed languidly away. Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to lurk. Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband's reticence. But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.

The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient's open window. Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy. Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his way home from chapel.

Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying his point of view. A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a struggle—THE end.

All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls. This heedful silken coming and going, these Sunday voices, this reiterant yelp of a single peevish bell—would they never cease? And above all, betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night. He sat down with elbows on knees and head on his hands, thinking of night, its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude.

His eyelids twitched; the fire before him had for an instant gone black out. He seemed to see slow-gesturing branches, grass stooping beneath a grey and wind-swept sky. He started up; and the remembrance of the morning returned to him—the glassy light, the changing rays, the beaming gilt upon the useless books. Now, at last, at the windows; afternoon had begun to wane. And when Sheila brought up his tea, as if Chance had heard his cry, she entered in hat and stole. She put down the tray, and paused at the glass, looking across it out of the window.

'Alice says you are to eat every one of those delicious sandwiches, and especially the tiny omelette. You have scarcely touched anything to-day, Arthur. I am a poor one to preach, I am afraid; but you know what that will mean—a worse breakdown still. You really must try to think of—of us all.'

'Are you going to church?' he asked in a low voice.

'Not, of course, if you would prefer not. But Dr Simon advised me most particularly to go out at least once a day. We must remember, this is not the beginning of your illness. Long-continued anxiety, I suppose, does tell on one in time. Anyhow, he said that I looked worried and run-down. I AM worried. Let us both try for each other's sakes, or even if only for Alice's, to—to do all we can. I must not harass you; but is there any—do you see the slightest change of any kind?'

'You always look pretty, Sheila; to-night you look prettier: THAT is the only change, I think.'

Mrs Lawford's attitude intensified in its stillness. 'Now, speaking quite frankly, what is it in you suggests these remarks at such a time? That's what baffles me. It seems so childish, so needlessly blind.'

'I am very sorry, Sheila, to be so childish. But I'm not, say what you like, blind. You ARE pretty: I'd repeat it if I was burning at the stake.'

Sheila lowered her eyes softly on to the rich-toned picture in the glass. 'Supposing,' she said, watching her lips move, 'supposing—of course, I know you are getting better and all that—but supposing you don't change back as Mr Bethany thinks, what will you do? Honestly, Arthur, when I think over it calmly, the whole tragedy comes back on me with such a force it sweeps me off my feet; I am for the moment scarcely my own mistress. What would you do?'

'I think, Sheila,' replied a low, infinitely weary voice, 'I think I should marry again.' It was the same wavering, faintly ironical voice that had slightly discomposed Dr Simon that same morning.

'"Marry again"!' exclaimed incredulously the full lips in the looking-glass. 'Who?'

'YOU, dear!'

Sheila turned softly round, conscious in a most humiliating manner that she had ever so little flushed.

Her husband was pouring out his tea, unaware, apparently, of her change of position. She watched him curiously. In spite of all her reason, of her absolute certainty, she wondered even again for a moment if this really could be Arthur. And for the first time she realised the power and mastery of that eager and far too hungry face. Her mind seemed to pause, fluttering in air, like a bird in the wind. She hastened rather unsteadily to the door.

'Will you want anything more, do you think, for an hour?' she asked.

Her husband looked up over his little table. 'Is Alice going with you?'

'Oh yes; poor child, she looks so pale and miserable. We are going to Mrs Sherwin's, and then on to Church. You will lock your door?'

'Yes, I will lock my door.'

'And I do hope Arthur—nothing rash!'

A change, that seemed almost the effect of actual shadow, came over his face. 'I wish you could stay with me,' he said slowly. 'I don't think you have any idea what—what I go through.'

It was as if a child had asked on the verge of terror for a candle in the dark. But an hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity. Sheila sighed.

'I think,' she said, 'I too might say that. But there; giving way will do nothing for either of us. I shall be gone only for an hour, or two at the most. And I told Mr Bethany I should have to come out before the sermon: it's only Mr Craik.'

'But why Mrs Sherwin? She'd worm a secret out of one's grave.'

'It's useless to discuss that, Arthur; you have always consistently disliked my friends. It's scarcely likely that you would find any improvement in them now.'

'Oh, well—' he began. But the door was already closed.

'Sheila!' he called in a burst of anger.

'Well, Arthur?'

'You have taken my latchkey.'

Sheila came hastily in again. 'Your latchkey?'

'I am going out.'

'"Going out!"—you will not be so mad, so criminal; and after your promise!'

He stood up. 'It is useless to argue. If I do not go out, I shall certainly go mad. As for criminal—why, that's a woman's word. Who on earth is to know me?'

'It is of no consequence, then, that the servants are already gossiping about this impossible Dr Ferguson; that you are certain to be seen either going or returning; that Alice is bound to discover that you are well enough to go out, and yet not even enough to say good-night to your own daughter—oh, it's monstrous, it's a frantic, a heartless thing to do!' Her voice vaguely suggested tears.

Lawford eyed her coldly and stubbornly—thinking of the empty room he would leave awaiting his return, its lamp burning, its fire-flames shining. It was almost a physical discomfort, this longing unspeakable for the twilight, the green secrecy and the silence of the graves. 'Keep them out of the way,' he said in a low voice; 'it will be dark when I come in.' His hardened face lit up. 'It's useless to attempt to dissuade me.'

'Why must you always be hurting me? why do you seem to delight in trying to estrange me?' Husband and wife faced each other across the clear-lit room. He did not answer.

'For the last time,' she said in a quiet, hard voice, 'I ask you not to go.'

He shrugged his shoulders. 'Ask me not to come back,' he said; 'that's nearer your hope.' He turned his face to the fire. Without moving he heard her go out, return, pause, and go out again. And when he deliberately wheeled round in his chair the little key lay conspicuous there on the counterpane.



CHAPTER NINE

The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate. The old stone church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow with crimson and purple. He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice through its open lattices. But the stooping stones and the cypresses were out of sight of its porch. He would not be seen down there. He paused a moment, however; his hat was drawn down over his eyes; he was shivering. Far over the harvest fields showed a growing pallor in the solitary seat beneath the cypresses. He stood hesitating, gazing steadily and yet half vacantly at the motionless figure, and in a while a face was lifted in his direction, and undisconcerted eyes calmly surveyed him.

'I am afraid,' called Lawford rather nervously—'I hope I am not intruding?'

'Not at all, not at all,' said the stranger. 'I have no privileges here; at least as yet.'

Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced. 'It's astonishingly quiet and beautiful,' he said.

The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields. 'Yes, it is, very,' he replied. There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of unfriendliness in the remark.

'You often sit here?' Lawford persisted.

The stranger raised his eyebrows. 'Oh yes, often.' He smiled. 'It is my own modest fashion of attending divine service. The congregation is rapt.'

'My visits,' said Lawford, 'have been very few—in fact, so far as I know, I have only once been here before.'

'I envy you the novelty.' There was again the same faint unmistakable antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in talking to a fellow creature who hadn't the least suspicion of anything unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to turn back. He made another effort—for conversation with strangers had always been a difficulty to him—and advanced towards the seat. 'You mustn't please let me intrude upon you,' he said, 'but really I am very interested in this queer old place. Perhaps you would tell me something of its history?' He sat down. His companion moved slowly to the other side of the broken gravestone.

'To tell you the truth,' he replied, picking his way as it were from word to word, 'it's "history," as people call it, does not interest me in the least. After all, it's not when a thing is, but what it is, that much matters. What this is'—he glanced, with head bent, across the shadowy stones, 'is pretty evident. Of course, age has its charms.'

'And is this very old?'

'Oh yes, it's old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps, is mainly an affair of the imagination. There's a tombstone near that little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century. That's pretty good weathering.' He smiled faintly. 'Of course, the church itself is centuries older, drenched with age. But she's still sleep-walking while these old tombstones dream. Glow-worms and crickets are not such bad bedfellows.'

'What interested me most, I think,' said Lawford haltingly, 'was this.' He pointed with his stick to the grave at his feet.

'Ah, yes, Sabathier's,' said the stranger; 'I know his peculiar history almost by heart.'

Lawford found himself staring with unusual concentration into the rather long and pale face. 'Not, I suppose,' he resumed faintly—'not, I suppose, beyond what's there.'

His companion leant his hand on the old stooping tombstone. 'Well, you know, there's a good deal there'—he stooped over—'if you read between the lines. Even if you don't.'

'A suicide,' said Lawford, under his breath.

'Yes, a suicide; that's why our Christian countrymen have buried him outside of the fold. Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.'

'Is this, then, unconsecrated ground?' said Lawford.

'Haven't you noticed,' drawled the other, 'how green the grass grows down here, and how very sharp are poor old Sabathier's thorns? Besides, he was a stranger, and they—kept him out.'

'But, surely,' said Lawford, 'was it so entirely a matter of choice—the laws of the Church? If he did kill himself, he did.'

The stranger turned with a little shrug. 'I don't suppose it's a matter of much consequence to HIM. I fancied I was his only friend. May I venture to ask why you are interested in the poor old thing?'

Lawford's mind was as calm and shallow as a millpond. 'Oh, a rather unusual thing happened to me here,' he said. 'You say you often come?'

'Often,' said the stranger rather curtly.

'Has anything—ever—occurred?'

'"Occurred?"' He raised his eyebrows. 'I wish it had. I come here simply, as I have said, because it's quiet; because I prefer the company of those who never answer me back, and who do not so much as condescend to pay me the least attention.' He smiled and turned his face towards the quiet fields.

Lawford, after a long pause, lifted his eyes. 'Do you think,' he said softly, 'it is possible one ever could?'

'"One ever could?"'

'Answer back?'

There was a low rotting wall of stone encompassing Sabathier's grave; on this the stranger sat down. He glanced up rather curiously at his companion. 'Seldom the time and the place and the revenant altogether. The thought has occurred to others,' he ventured to add.

'Of course, of course,' said Lawford eagerly. 'But it is an absolutely new one to me. I don't mean that I have never had such an idea, just in one's own superficial way; but'—he paused and glanced swiftly into the fast-thickening twilight—'I wonder: are they, do you think, really, all quite dead?'

'Call and see!' taunted the stranger softly.

'Ah, yes, I know,' said Lawford. 'But I believe in the resurrection of the body; that is what we say; and supposing, when a man dies—supposing it was most frightfully against one's will; that one hated the awful inaction that death brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one might—just quietly, you know, try to get out? wouldn't you?' he added.

'And, surely,' he found himself beginning gently to argue again, 'surely, what about, say, him?' He nodded towards the old and broken grave that lay between them.

'What, Sabathier?' the other echoed, laying his hand upon the stone.

And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable question.

'He was a stranger; it says so. Good God!' said Lawford, 'how he must have wanted to get home! He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the fret and fever he must have been in—just before. Imagine it.'

'But it might, you know,' suggested the other with a smile—'might have been sheer indifference.'

'"Nicholas Sabathier, Stranger to this parish"—no, no,' said Lawford, his heart beating as if it would choke him, 'I don't fancy it was indifference.'

It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger's features but there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice. 'And how do you suppose your angry naughty child would set about it? It's narrow quarters; how would he begin?'

Lawford sat quite still. 'You say—I hope I am not detaining you—you say you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever had—have you ever fallen asleep here?'

'Why do you ask?' inquired the other curiously.

'I was only wondering,' said Lawford. He was cold and shivering. He felt instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding mist that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk-pale in the rising moon. The stranger turned away from him.

'"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,"' he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word. 'What did you dream?'

Lawford glanced helplessly about him. The moon cast lean grey beams of light between the cypresses. But to his wide and wandering eyes it seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning stones. 'Have you ever noticed it?' he said, putting out his hand towards his unknown companion; 'this stone is cracked from head to foot?... But there'—he rose stiff and chilled—'I am afraid I have bored you with my company. You came here for solitude, and I have been trying to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses. You will forgive my intrusion?' There was a kind of old-fashioned courtesy in his manner that he himself was dimly aware of. He held out his hand.

'I hope you will think nothing of the kind,' said the other earnestly; 'how could it be in any sense an intrusion? It's the old story of Bluebeard. And I confess I too should very much like a peep into his cupboard. Who wouldn't? But there, it's merely a matter of time, I suppose.' He paused, and together they slowly ascended the path already glimmering with a heavy dew. At the porch they paused once more. And now it was the stranger that held out his hand.

'Perhaps,' he said, 'you will give me the pleasure of some day continuing our talk. As for our friend below, it so happens that I have managed to pick up a little more of his history than the sexton seems to have heard of—if you would care some time or other to share it. I live only at the foot of the hill, not half a mile distant. Perhaps you could spare the time now?'

Lawford took out his watch, 'You are really very kind,' he said. 'But, perhaps—well, whatever that history may be, I think you would agree that mine is even—but, there, I've talked too much about myself already. Perhaps to-morrow?'

'Why, to-morrow, then,' said his companion. 'It's a flat wooden house, on the left-hand side. Come at any time of the evening'; he paused again and smiled—'the third house after the Rectory, which is marked up on the gate. My name is Herbert—Herbert Herbert to be precise.'

Lawford took out his pocket-book and a card. 'Mine,' he said, handing it gravely to his companion. 'is Lawford—at least...' It was really the first time that either had seen the other's face at close quarters and clear-lit; and on Lawford's a moon almost at the full shone dazzlingly. He saw an expression—dismay, incredulity, overwhelming astonishment—start suddenly into the dark, rather indifferent eyes.

'What is it?' he cried, hastily stooping close.

'Why,' said the other, laughing and turning away, 'I think the moon must have bewitched me too.'



CHAPTER TEN

Lawford listened awhile before opening his door. He heard voices in the dining-room. A light shone faintly between the blinds of his bedroom. He very gently let himself in, and unheard, unseen, mounted the stairs. He sat down in front of the fire, tired out and bitterly cold in spite of his long walk home. But his mind was wearier even than his body. He tried in vain to catch up the thread of his thoughts. He only knew for certain that so far as his first hope and motives had gone his errand had proved entirely futile. 'How could I possibly fall asleep with that fellow talking there?' he had said to himself angrily; yet knew in his heart that their talk had driven every other idea out of his mind. He had not yet even glanced into the glass. His every thought was vainly wandering round and round the one curious hint that had drifted in, but which he had not yet been able to put into words.

Supposing, though, that he had really fallen into a deep sleep, with none to watch or spy—what then? However ridiculous that idea, it was not more ridiculous, more incredible than the actual fact. If he had remained there, he might, it was just possible that he would by now, have actually awakened just his own familiar every-day self again. And the thought of that—though he hardly realised its full import—actually did send him on tip-toe for a glance that more or less effectually set the question at rest. And there looked out at him, it seemed, the same dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights ago—expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the glittering eyes. And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own volition, drew together and questioned him—'Whose?'

He was not to be given much leisure, however, for fantastic reveries like this. As he leaned his head on his hands, gladly conscious that he could not possibly bear this incessant strain for long, Sheila opened the door. He started up.

'I wish you would knock,' he said angrily; 'you talk of quiet; you tell me to rest, and think; and here you come creeping and spying on me as if I was a child in a nursery. I refuse to be watched and guarded and peeped on like this.' He knew that his hands were trembling, that he could not keep his eyes fixed, that his voice was nearly inarticulate.

Sheila drew in her lips. 'I have merely come to tell you, Arthur, that Mr Bethany has brought Mr Danton in to supper. He agrees with me it really would be advisable to take such a very old and prudent and practical friend into our confidence. You do nothing I ask of you. I simply cannot bear the burden of this incessant anxiety. Look, now, what your night walk has done for you! You look positively at death's door.'

'What—what an instinct you have for the right word,' said Lawford softly. 'And Danton, of all people in the world! It was surely rather a curious, a thoughtless choice. Has he had supper?'

'Why do you ask?'

'He won't believe: too—bloated.'

'I think,' said Sheila indignantly, 'it is hardly fair to speak of a very old and a very true friend of mine in such—well, vulgar terms as that. Besides, Arthur, as for believing—without in the least desiring to hurt your feelings—I must candidly warn you, some people won't.'

'Come along,' said Lawford, with a faint gust of laughter; 'let's see.'

They went quickly downstairs, Sheila with less dignity, perhaps, than she had been surprised into since she had left a slimmer girlhood behind. She swept into the gaze of the two gentlemen standing together on the hearthrug; and so was caught, as it were, between a rain of conflicting glances, for her husband had followed instantly, and stood now behind her, stooping a little, and with something between contempt and defiance confronting an old fat friend, whom that one brief challenging instant had congealed into a condition of passive and immovable hostility.

Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately turned himself towards his companion. His small eyes wandered, and instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford.

'Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.'

'You take such formidable risks, Lawford,' said Mr Bethany in a dry, difficult voice.

'Am I really to believe,' Danton began huskily. 'I am sure, Bethany, you will—My dear Mrs Lawford!' said he, stirring vaguely, glancing restlessly.

'It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,' said a voice from the doorway. 'To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either way. And'—he lifted a long arm—'I must positively refuse to produce the least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally aware, even the Man in the Moon. Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic. Aren't you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?'

'I really—' began Danton in a rich still voice.

'Oh, but you know you are,' drawled on the slightly hesitating long-drawn syllables; 'it's your parochial metier. Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You'll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting's there!'

Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke. He turned swiftly on Mrs Lawford. 'Why, why, could you not have seen?' he cried.

'It's no good, Vicar. She's all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold. North, south, east, west—to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry the wind. There's nothing to be got from poor Sheila but....

'Lawford!' the little man's voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip; 'I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear good fellow, remember, remember it's only the will, the will that keeps us breathing.'

Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and flickered with shadows before his eyes. 'What's he mean, then,' he muttered huskily, 'coming here with his black, still carcase—peeping, peeping—what's he mean, I say?' There was a moment's silence. Then with lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.

'I suppose,' began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself from the humiliation of the moment, 'I suppose he was—wandering?'

'Bless me, yes,' said Mr Bethany cordially—'fever. We all know what that MEANS.'

'Yes,' said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford's white and intent gaze.

'Just think, think, Danton—the awful, incessant strain of such an ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing means!'

Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. 'Oh yes. But—eh?—needlessly abusive? I never SAID I disbelieved him.'

'Do you?' said Mrs Lawford's voice.

He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his legs. 'Eh?' he said.

Mr Bethany sat down at the table. 'I rather feared some such temporary breakdown as this, Danton. I think I foresaw it. And now, just while we are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn't it be as well, don't you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties? I know—we all know, that that poor half-demented creature IS Arthur Lawford. This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now. An awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him—this change. I own frankly at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it has staggered you. But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face, heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep. I had no more doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind that I—am I. We do in some mysterious way, you'll own at once, grow so accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other's faces (masks though they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking together. And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is instantly apparent.'

'Oh yes, Vicar; but you see—'

Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: 'One moment, please. I have heard Lawford's own account. Conscious or unconscious, he has been through some terrific strain, some such awful conflict with the unseen powers that we—thank God!—have only read about, and never perhaps, until death is upon us, shall witness for ourselves. What more likely, more inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its masking shadow?—call it what you will. A smile can turn a face we dread into a face we'd die for. Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world's mercy. They made him a nine days' wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world—for the time being; oh yes, just for the time being. Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine or yours will some day bring him back to us again. We don't attempt to explain; we can't. We simply believe.'

But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an aquarium.

'My dear good Danton,' persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience, 'how old are you?'

'I don't see quite...' smiled Danton with recovered ease, and rapidly mobilising forces. 'Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I'm forty-three.'

'Good,' said Mr Bethany; 'and I'm seventy-one, and this child here'—he pointed an accusing finger at Sheila—is youth perpetual. So,' he briskly brightened, 'say, between us we're six score all told. Are we—can we, deliberately, with this mere pinch of years at our command out of the wheeling millions that have gone—can we say, "This is impossible," to any single phenomenon? CAN we?'

'No, we can't, of course,' said Danton formidably. 'Not finally. That's all very well, but'—he paused, and nodded, nodding his round head upward as if towards the inaudible overhead, 'I suppose he can't HEAR?'

Mr Bethany rose cheerfully. 'All right, Danton; I am afraid you are exactly what the poor fellow in his delirium solemnly asseverated. And, jesting apart, it is in delirium that we tell our sheer, plain, unadulterated truth: you're a nicely covered sceptic. Personally, I refuse to discuss the matter. Mere dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if you like. I will only remark just this—that Mrs Lawford and I, in our inmost hearts, know. You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely incredulously grope. Faith versus Reason—that prehistoric Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back to us. This—this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put up. He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage. But now, because I ask it, and this poor child here entreats it, you will say nothing to a living soul about the matter, say, till Friday? What step-by-step creatures we are, to be sure! I say Friday because it will be exactly a week then. And what's a week?—to Nature scarcely the unfolding of a rose. But still, Friday be it. Then, if nothing has occurred, we will, we shall HAVE to call a friendly gathering, we shall be compelled to have a friendly consultation.'

'I'm not, I hope, a brute, Bethany,' said Danton apologetically; 'but, honestly, speaking for myself, simply as a man of the world, it's a big risk to be taking on—what shall we call it?—on mere intuition. Personally, and even in a court of law—though Heaven forbid it ever reaches that stage—personally, I could swear that the fellow that stood abusing me there, in that revolting fashion, was not Lawford. It would be easier even to believe in him, if there were not that—that glaze, that shocking simulation of the man himself, the very man. But then, I am a sceptic; I own it. And 'pon my word, Mrs Lawford, there's plenty of room for sceptics in a world like this.'

'Very well,' said Mr Bethany crisply, 'that's settled, then. With your permission, my dear,' he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike eyes on Sheila, 'I will take all risks—even to the foot of the gibbet: accessory, Danton, AFTER the fact.' And so direct and cloudless was his gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse of Danton's small agate-like eyes, now completely under mastery, and awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.

'Of course,' she said, 'I am entirely in your hands, dear Mr Bethany.'



CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lawford slept far into the cloudy Monday morning, to wake steeped in sleep, lethargic, and fretfully haunted by inconclusive remembrances of the night before. When Sheila, with obvious and capacious composure, brought him his breakfast tray, he watched her face for some time without speaking.

'Sheila,' he began, as she was about to leave the room again.

She paused, smiling.

'Did anything happen last night? Would you mind telling me, Sheila? Who was it was here?'

Her lids the least bit narrowed. 'Certainly, Arthur; Mr Danton was here.'

'Then it was not a dream?'

'Oh no,' said Sheila.

'What did I say? What did HE say? It was hopeless, anyhow.'

'I don't quite understand what you mean by "hopeless," Arthur. And must I answer the other questions?'

Lawford drew his hand over his face, like a tired child. 'He didn't—believe?'

'No, dear,' said Sheila softly.

'And you, Sheila?' came the subdued voice.

Sheila crossed slowly to the window. 'Well, quite honestly, Arthur, I was not very much surprised. Whatever we are agreed about on the whole, you were scarcely yourself last night.'

Lawford shut his eyes, and re-opened them full on his wife's calm scrutiny, who had in that moment turned in the light of the one drawn blind to face him again.

'Who is? Always?'

'No,' said Sheila; 'but—it was at least unfortunate. We can't, I suppose, rely on Dr Bethany alone.'

Lawford crouched over his food. 'Will he blab?'

'Blab! Mr Danton is a gentleman, Arthur.'

Lawford rolled his eyes as if in temporary vertigo. 'Yes,' he said. And Sheila once more prepared to make a reposeful exit.

'I don't think I can see Simon this morning.'

'Oh. Who, then?'

'I mean I would prefer to be left alone.'

'Believe me, I had no intention to intrude.' And this time the door really closed.

'He is in a quiet, soothing sleep,' said Sheila a few minutes later.

'Nothing could be better,' said Dr Simon; and Lawford, to his inexpressible relief, heard the fevered throbbing of the doctor's car reverse, and turned over and shut his eyes, dulled and exhausted in the still unfriendliness of the vacant room. His spirits had sunk, he thought, to their lowest ebb. He scarcely heeded the fragments of dreams—clear, green landscapes, amazing gleams of peace, the sudden broken voices, the rustling and calling shadowiness of subconsciousness—in this quiet sunlight of reality. The clouds had broken, or had been withdrawn like a veil from the October skies. One thought alone was his refuge; one face alone haunted him with its peace; one remembrance soothed him—Alice. Through all his scattered and purposeless arguments he strove to remember her voice, the loving-kindness of her eyes, her untroubled confidence.

In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He dressed by the fireplace.

'I couldn't rest,' he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; 'and one tires of reading even Quain in bed.'

'Have you found anything?' she inquired politely.

'Oh yes,' said Lawford wearily; 'I have discovered that infinitely worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there's nothing quite so picturesque.'

'Tell me,' said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. 'How does it feel? does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?'

He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for inspiration. 'Practically, not at all,' he said hollowly. 'Of course, one's nerves—that fellow Danton—when one's overtired. You have'—his voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered—'YOU haven't noticed anything? My mind?'

'Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me unsympathetic—but don't you think we must sooner or later be thinking of what's to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn't. You WILL help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!'

'What about Alice?'

'She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter of that, even if he was, at death's door.'

'At death's door,' murmured Lawford under his breath; 'who was it was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one's thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond—O God, beyond!'

Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. 'And was all that in Quain?' she inquired rather flutteringly.

Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.

She shook herself, with a slight shiver. 'Very well, then,' she said and paused in the silence.

Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. 'What has he been saying now?' he inquired like a fretful child.

Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare, wild, timid creature by the least stir. 'Who?' she merely breathed.

Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. 'It's just the last rags of that beastly influenza,' he said, and began vigorously combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.

But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.

He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been Alice's nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the garden—the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a flower-bed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and—yes, three wicker chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the smooth grass in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass—Alice's big garden hat—and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would he bark at the strange, distasteful scent of a—Dr Ferguson? The coast was clear, then. He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still, and hovering betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his daughter, looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had both been suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly silence.

'We thought,' he began at last, 'we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford from the window. He—he is asleep.'

Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed and left her pale. 'I will go down and tell mother you want to see her. It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I suppose, thinking of my father—' The words faltered, and the eyes were lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford turned away heartsick and trembling.

'Certainly, certainly, by no means,' he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so much better than one when there's the least—the least difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility of a shock, else—' His voice fell away, his eloquence failed.

For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. 'Oh yes,' she replied, 'I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even, it would—I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him, Dr Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn't even breathe. Couldn't it possibly help—even a faith-cure?' She leant forward impulsively, her voice trembling, anal her eyes still shining beneath their faint, melancholy smile.

'I fear, my dear...it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his mind, you know, in this state, it might—?'

'But mother never told me,' broke in the girl desperately, 'there was anything wrong with his MIND. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You don't mean, you don't mean—that—?'

Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room that fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable pain and longing. 'Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not even wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on for you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but—'

'You talk,' she broke in again angrily, 'only in pretence! You are treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why, if he can walk and talk in the night....'

'But who—who "can walk and talk in the night?"' inquired a low stealthy voice out of the quietness behind her.

Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance, with all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure, looking up at her from the staircase.

'I was—I was talking to Dr Ferguson, mother.'

'But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something of Dr Ferguson, "if," you were saying, "he can walk and talk in the night": you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could not possibly be, in his state. Dr Ferguson, I know, will bear me out in that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out medical directions to the letter. Dr Ferguson I know, will fully concur. Do, pray, Dr Ferguson,' continued Sheila, raising her voice even now scarcely above a rapid murmur—'do pray assure my daughter that she must have patience; that however much even he himself may desire it, it is impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my dear child, come down, I want to have a moment's talk with Dr Ferguson. I feared from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.'

Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell suddenly on the pin in his scarf—the claw and the pearl she had known all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented thing's, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression, and her heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. 'She has fainted?' he said; 'oh, Sheila, tell me—only fainted?'

Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes.

'Some day, Sheila' he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue, twitching lids, he passed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal volatile and eau de cologne....

It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of his house. With a glance of circumspection that almost seemed to suggest a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made aware in so doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness pointing out the mysterious Dr Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One or two well-known and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the thin stream of City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a still, high evening, and something very like a forlorn compassion rose in his mind at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull, respectable faces.

He found himself walking with an affectation of effrontery, and smiling with a faint contempt on all alike, as if to keep himself from slinking, and the wolf out of his eyes. He felt restless, and watchful, and suspicious, as if he had suddenly come down in the world. His, then, was a disguise as effectual as a shabby coat and a glazing eye. His heart sickened. Was it even worth while living on a crust of social respectability so thin and so exquisitely treacherous? He challenged no one. One or two actual acquaintances raised and lowered a faintly inquiring eyebrow in his direction. One even recalled in his confusion a smile of recognition just a moment too late. There was, it seemed, a peculiar aura in Lawford's presence, a shadow of a something in his demeanour that proved him alien.

None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should come to the worst, why—there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for the beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets, and soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with dying colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows filled the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him here. He looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops were left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he was descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had wandered down into the churchyard.

At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its old red chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with windows vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds that stood mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then came more lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that pricks, and then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied gate of the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part described.

It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure. Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a narrow box-edged path led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience he heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused on the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence; but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently a quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into a little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints and obscure portraits in dark frames.