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Miss Roseingrave was a very self-contained character and led a reserved life. She always disdained to gossip with the servants at the Grange or to make any acquaintance with the neighbouring farmers; those who had timidly endeavoured to solicit her friendship had received sharp rebuffs. Even the strange home-coming of Sir William Notley did not induce her to lower her pride so far as to go up to the Grange and ask Mrs Barlow for news.

When, in last night’s moonlight, she had returned home she had merely gone to the little kitchen where the housekeeper sat gibbering and praying and said coldly:

‘Mrs Barlow, you are a very foolish woman. It is your master come home—Sir William himself—or else some acquaintance of his making a clever imposture. Mr Morley of Griffinshaws will soon set us aright on the matter, but as for the Devil,’ the young woman had laughed contemptuously, ‘why, I wonder that those tawdry bits so deceived you!’ And then, without waiting for the abashed woman to reply with exclamations of doubt and astonishment, she had blown out her candle and ascended, by the light of the moon to her own room, still filled with silver light.

On the next hot, quiet day she had gone decorously about her duties. There were plenty of these in the Dower House, for though it was but small it was elaborately furnished and Miss Roseingrave had no assistance beyond that of Mother Cloke, a reputed witch who had a cottage down on the marshlands; she would work for none other than Miss Roseingrave, nor would Miss Roseingrave employ any other woman. She disdained to give any explanation for this peculiar choice, for there was many a hardworking, lusty girl who would have been glad of the work at the Dower House; she might have had her choice of many servants, but would have none other than the gnarled Mother Cloke of dubious reputation.

No doubt this association helped to give a slightly sinister air to Miss Roseingrave’s retirement at the Dower House. Mrs Barlow and the other servants who looked after the Grange, the tenants of the scattered sheep farms, the shepherds who tended their flocks in the wide fields sloping to the marsh, the village folk, all thought with a certain awe, of the young woman who lived in the Dower House amid the chestnut trees of the great park with her imbecile sister and her paralysed mother and only Mother Cloke to help her nurse these two piteous invalids, for Phoebe was sickly as well as feeble-minded, and often came near to dying.

It was known that the Roseingraves had the Dower House through the charity of the late Sir William and that they were in some way his relatives, but their history was vague in the minds of their simple neighbours. Mrs Roseingrave, though now stiff and distorted by her disease, yet bore the remains of considerable beauty, and the tale went that she had been a belle and well dowered, too, from a fine family; she had run away with a poor musician who had afterwards gone mad and left her penniless, and only through her desperate appeal to her cousin, the late Sir William, had she and her two daughters found this asylum in their utmost distress.

However this might be, Miss Roseingrave never spoke of her past nor of her mother’s story, nor did any relatives of her father’s family ever come to visit them, nor the mail-coach ever leave letters for them at the Ewe and Lamb. They had lived isolated in the park of the deserted Grange for twenty years. Their visitors were few; sometimes the Vicar rather timidly made his way into the park and drank a dish of tea with Miss Julia. She did not encourage this courtesy and was seldom seen at the church, though she professed a cold orthodoxy. She had a valid excuse for her neglect, in the charge of her afflicted relatives.

Sometimes, too, Dr Rowland would come to the Dower House, and he seemed more after Miss Julia’s mind. He was learned and a great scholar and might have done well for himself in the City, but preferred a philosophic peace.

He was a man of great mental energy and all his activities were turned inward, for outwardly he led an eventless life. His mind and his spirit dwelt much in other worlds, and he was accused of magical experiments and crystal gazing and even of some obscure partnership with Mother Cloke, whose knowledge of natural forces he had often declared to be extraordinary.

But Doctor Rowland lived far away from Holcot Grange and was much absorbed in his own speculations and experiments, so his visits, therefore, to Miss Julia Roseingrave, were rare.

One other acquaintance this lady had who might be considered of her own rank, that was Mr Morley, steward of Holcot, who lived at Griffinshaws. He was a middle-aged man, robust, and not uncomely. Five years before he had had the daring to offer himself as a suitor for the hand of the dark young woman. He was so sincere in his passion, which took more the form of a fascination than an affection, that he, practical and businesslike as he was, had been prepared to waive the question of the young lady’s dowry. He understood that she lived on a mere pittance and even that, such as it was, would have to be reserved for her helpless mother and sister. But she had refused him with sharp contempt, and when he, being really involved in the affair, had overlooked her insults and still pressed his suit, she took him into the Dower House and showed him her mother, lying rigid on a couch, and her sister drolling by the window and said to him with a fine curl of her arched upper lip: ‘Are you willing to take these too, with you, till one of us, you or I, die? As for the insane, Dr Rowland tells me they will live very long.’

Then Mr Morley had gone away without a word and a twelvemonth after had married a farmer’s daughter who made him happy. His feelings for Miss Julia Roseingrave had had a curious reaction, he now never saw her without feeling glad that he had not married her, yet, as far as her beauty went, she had improved with the years. She was now a rare creature, of such uncommon graces that they were not rightly to be valued by the rustics among whom she lived.

The day after the coming of Sir William Notley to Holcot Grange, Mr Morley, who had, early in the day, been summoned to the house, chose to return through the park, and rode his horse slowly past the Dower House. He was not above the pleasure of giving and receiving news, and Mrs Barlow had told him of the part Miss Roseingrave had played last night. He was not deceived in his expectation that she would be waiting for him, she must have been listening for the sound of his horse’s hoofs, for by the time he reached the Dower House she was standing under the honeysuckle on the porch.

Mr Morley looked at her with a curious sense of the emptiness and deadness of the little house behind. Her alert and vivid vitality was like a tiny flame in a dark lantern. The coral horns of the honeysuckle waved above her dark hair and she was wiping, on a small square of muslin, her fingers, stained from plucking currants.

‘I thought you would come this way,’ she smiled. ‘You want to speak to me about last night, I suppose.’

Mr Morley, leaning good-humouredly from his saddle, tried to turn this about.

‘I thought you would want to know the news, Miss Roseingrave.’

But her indifference was not to be pierced.

‘Oh, I care very little. You may ride on if you will.’

So then he had to surrender, for he was eager to tell someone of his interview with Sir William, and who else was there to tell besides Miss Julia Roseingrave? His own wife would be totally disinterested. She was absorbed, dear, pretty Priscilla, as a good kind woman should be, in the two babies, and her house.

‘It is Sir William in very truth, though I believe, Miss Julia, last night you doubted it. It was very courageous of you to go up there alone after Mrs Barlow’s crazy story of the Devil.’

‘Why was it courageous, since the story was so crazy?’ she countered, ‘and I did believe it was Sir William. Who else could have known the place and come in with such effrontery?’ Then lowering her voice she added cunningly: ‘What has he done?’

‘Why, what should he have done?’ replied Mr Morley, uncomfortably. ‘He had a whim to come here, I suppose. It is one of his properties that he has never visited before.’

‘And would not have visited now,’ said Miss Roseingrave, ‘had he not had a good reason. Do you think, Mr Morley, that he would have come here to make your acquaintance or mine?’

‘It would be only natural, Miss Roseingrave, that he should wish to see the place, which, after all, is a property of considerable value, and has been well and carefully kept up.’

‘To come here like that at dead of night in a stupid carnival dress, masked, and on a sweating post-horse!’

The steward shrugged before her cool contempt.

‘Well, if Sir William has his story he does not tell it to me. He said he was here for several months, for the full summer, he thought. That he was sick of town ways and rioting; he gave me to understand that he had not a great deal of money, but had gambled away whole estates and sold others and was by no means the rich man we still suppose him.’

‘He looked,’ remarked Miss Roseingrave dryly, ‘that manner of fool.’

‘Fool, I don’t think he is,’ said Mr Morley, ‘but merely a young fashionable who must go the way of his time and his set. He told me there was something he wished to do, for which he must have privacy. To write a book or make some chemical experiment, as I suppose. No doubt it is but a whim of one who can afford to indulge whims.’

‘No doubt,’ echoed Miss Julia Roseingrave. ‘I do not suppose he will be here for longer than a short time. The rest of the summer shall we say? Six weeks, two months?’

‘His servant,’ said the steward, ‘is coming today with some of his effects. At present he has nothing to wear but my brown jersey suit he begged me to bring along.’

‘You are sure that it is Sir William Notley?’ asked Miss Roseingrave. She came from under the waving shadows of the honeysuckle and approached Mr Morley’s side. From the Dower House came the sudden sound of the idiot girl singing in a thin, broken voice.

‘Yes, it is Sir William,’ said Mr Morley. ‘I have never seen him before, but his conversation proves that he is no impostor.’

‘Where did he come ftom?’ asked the young lady. Her slender, cool fingers, which smelt of currant leaves, patted the glossy neck of the bay horse.

‘I believe he came from London.’ Mr Morley could not resist gossiping. He lowered his voice, carefully, however; he thought it was not altogether wise, even in the depths of the park, to be turning tales of his master on whom his livelihood depended, over his tongue. ‘And I believe, Miss Julia, that there was some trouble. Some riot or brawl, or maybe a duello, for he had certainly ridden fast, and it was a strange dress to ride in.’

‘How did he get through the turnpikes?’

‘By talking, I suppose, of a wager.’

‘What manner of man do you suppose him to be, Mr Morley?’

And Julia Roseingrave raised her dark eyes that were full of a deep lustre like a flame reflected in a stone of polished jet, to the good-natured, comely face of the steward.

‘I could not judge much in a short interview, Madam Julia, but he seemed to me to be rather a fantastical kind of a fellow, full of odd notions and whims and who must be ever experimenting. He thinks that he will have a new experience at Holcot Grange such as he has read of in poems writ by men who have never been out of a town, of neat handed Phillis, and curds and whey, lowing herds and bowls of cream and perpetual peace.’

‘There is all that here,’ smiled Miss Julia. ‘Give my duty to your wife.’

Thus, with a nod and a smile, as if she dismissed an inferior, Miss Julia returned to the Dower House. She had scarcely closed the door behind her before the wild songs of the idiot girl ceased.

Mr Morley rode on his way with a faint sense of uneasiness, which never failed to touch him after he had encountered Miss Roseingrave. He pondered a little over her name—rose-in-a-grave—when he had first seen her he had thought it should be rather rose-in-leaf, or rose-in-bloom, but now he did rather think of her as a rose shut into a grave; the grave of that lonely house, with those two people who lived their death in life around her.

Sir William Notley had asked him questions of Miss Roseingrave, and he, Jonathan Morley, had answered them with some embarrassment.

What was there to say of her? She was much respected and admired.

By whom?

By simple rustics who rather feared her reserve and pride.

‘Why does she continue to live there?’ Sir William had asked impatiently. ‘Why did she come to look at me last night? That was a strange thing to do.’

Then Mr Morley had found himself saying, though he had not meant to admit as much:

‘She is a strange woman.’

To which remark the young baronet had replied with a certain exasperation:

‘Bah! There is no such thing as a strange woman. I have met a fair number, Mr Morley, but look you, there were none of them strange, though many of them affected to be thought so.’