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Sir William went to the Dower House and looked at it earnestly before he knocked for admission.

The garden, unlike the garden of the Grange, was small, modest, and homely. There were no weeds nor any faded flowers. Even the most prodigal sweets of the summer were pruned and trained. And the front of the small brick house had an innocent, care-free look. Clean white curtains were at the windows, the panes of glass shone brightly, being newly rubbed, and the honeysuckle over the porch had been tied back with a careful hand.

The young man thought that all this air of orderly decorum was a mere deception or part of a snare.

He knocked at the door. He had been so sure that she would open to him that the look on his face was for her and for her only. He was therefore amazed when a man stood before him holding the door-knob in his hand and greeting him with a ready courtesy.

‘You are Sir William Notley? Miss Roseingrave saw you from the window and asked me to admit you at once.’

‘And who, sir, are you?’ asked the young baronet, sullenly. He felt the flavour of the afternoon spoiled by the intrusion of the personality of this stranger.

‘I am Dr Rowland, and I ride over sometimes to attend to Mrs Roseingrave. Not that anything can be done for her,’ he added confidentially, lowering his voice as the two stood together in the narrow passage, ‘but I believe that my occasional presence is some comfort to Miss Julia.’

Sir William eyed the physician with disdain.

He was a man past middle age with an air of great vitality and energy. The cut of his murrey-coloured suit was long out of date, but he was neat and orderly in his attire. His limbs were well made and well knit and there was a cast of nobility in his haggard face round which the pale hair, half blond, half grey, curled like a mane.

He courteously stood aside while Sir William preceded him to a little parlour, overstocked with small, bright, shining objects where Julia Roseingrave sat behind a tea service of pale blue china.

She wore a linen gown, that had been many times washed and mended, fastened with scoured, ironed green ribbon. The long swathes of her dark hair were fastened by iron pins and there was nothing about her that was not faded and common.

Sir William thought that this decorous poverty was like the respectable exterior of the house, part of the disguise and the snare.

Dr Rowland took his leave almost immediately; he displayed neither curiosity nor deference towards Sir William, only a rather abstracted courtesy, and when he had left the house the young man remarked:

‘You are strange people here, you live in an isolation where nothing seems to have ever happened, yet when the unusual occurs you do not marvel at it.’

‘That is Dr Rowland,’ said Miss Roseingrave, replying obliquely to this comment. ‘He lives a long way from here and I do not often see him. I cannot suppose that a man like that would ever be greatly surprised at anything. His studies are very abstruse and take him into other worlds.’

‘But you,’ he asked directly, ‘you have no such consolation in your solitude. I hear from Mrs Barlow, who is a good gossip, that your mother and your sister are both ill. You must, then, have very little company.’

‘Very little human company,’ she replied.

‘Then you, also, Miss Roseingrave, know something of those other worlds with which Dr Rowland is familiar?’

She poured out the steaming tea into the shallow blue cups and offered him one. The sun had begun to penetrate very faintly the mist, so that a dim pattern of light fell through the waving boughs of the woodbine into the small room.

‘If I were to tell you of my life here and the company I have, and what goes on on the marsh and in the woods, aye, and even in the open pastures, you would no more believe it than I should be able to credit you, were you to tell me what your life was in the city.’

‘I shall never tell you that,’ he countered, ‘for I wish to forget it myself.’

She directly challenged that.

‘Why? Everything that has ever happened to me I wish to remember.’

Sir William smiled unpleasantly, and gulped his tea. It was the first time that he ever recalled having tasted that beverage, for he had always avoided the company of gentlewomen.

‘You do not wish to tell me,’ said Julia Roseingrave, coolly. ‘Well, no doubt you were concerned in something frightful or you never would have come to Holcot Grange. And, of course, you will not stay, as soon as you realise that you are out of danger.’

It seemed to the young man, sitting there holding the blue cup in his hands, that there was another voice behind hers which rose shrill and high like an echo, and said: ‘Fly, you are in more danger now than you ever were in your life.’ So intense was this impression that he glanced round the room to see if, small as the apartment was, there might not be somebody concealed behind one of the pieces of furniture, who had thus mocked her and him. But they were alone together.

She marked his glance and asked:

‘What are you considering? You are not at all open with me, Sir William. You were very short when I first saw you on the night of your arrival at the Grange. It was strange, no doubt, for me to come into your chamber like that, but remember that poor Mrs Barlow came running up through the night and told me that she had admitted the Devil.’

‘You were courageous,’ he mocked, ‘seeing that you do not believe in the Devil or maybe are his ally.’

‘And you are blunt,’ she replied indifferently. ‘I have never met a fine gentleman before. I had thought you would have been more courteous. Why have you paid me the honour of this visit?—I do not think we shall greatly amuse each other.’

‘Oh, Miss Roseingrave,’ he exclaimed impatiently and rising as he spoke, ‘will you not come with me into the woods? It is so close and confined here.’

‘I may not leave my mother and sister,’ she answered. ‘At present my mother sleeps, my sister plays with her white rabbits, but at any moment my mother may wake and Phoebe may begin to cry.’

Sir William walked up and down the room, which his great height and lordly presence made appear as cabined and as contemptible as a cage.

‘The herb woman whom they call Goody Cloke, she is your friend, is she not?’

‘She is an acquaintance of mine, Sir William, she works for me. She is the only person whom I can find who is willing to drudge for my mother and sister. This is not accounted a cheerful house and I can afford to pay very little.’

He gave her a sidelong look where she sat sipping her tea primly and thought of all his life had been, as a schoolboy, as a scholar at Oxford, as a young man travelling in Italy and France, of the people whom he had met and the adventures he had had, and the large sums of money he had spent and thrown away, and all the while Julia Roseingrave had been sitting in the Dower House, drinking tea, going about her small duties, and, with the aid of the herb woman, attending a paralysed mother and an imbecile sister, and throughout all there had been ahead of him and of her, the day when they were bound to meet. He said:

‘I walked in Ballote Wood the other night and saw a nymph bathing.’

‘You may, sir,’ said she, ‘see many worse, and many better things in Ballote Wood.’

‘If I go there again shall I see her again?’ he challenged; and her eyes that had that smouldering light in them, like a flame reflected in a tablet of polished jet, were full on him as she answered:

‘I can assure you that you will not. No one who pries in Ballote Wood sees the same thing twice.’

‘Stop this fencing or play of words,’ said he. ‘Could you not love me a little?’

Miss Roseingrave set down her tea-cup and put her smooth hand to her smooth hair that was slipping slightly from the iron pins.

‘I could love no man a little,’ she answered; ‘I have a scorn for love measured out, aye, or passion, by the thimbleful.’

‘What do you know,’ he asked, half-angrily, ‘of either love or passion?’

‘Enough, Sir William, to fill all my days and nights with dreams,’ she said, but more with uneasiness than contempt. ‘You are here for a space,’ she smiled, ‘hiding, as I think, at odds with your usual fortunes, concealed from the handlings of mischance. And you wish for a pleasant interlude, a play of shadows-love-in-idleness. Well, I shall not be your partner.’

‘Why?’ he demanded, pausing full in front of her.

The sun had brightened again and the room was full of yellow light, only broken by the waving shadows of the woodbine-torn flowers, red tendrils, and scarlet berries blown sideways from the porch.

‘Perhaps you do not please me,’ she said coldly, and at that he raged, for no woman had ever scorned him before, but all, out of liking or interest or fear, had flattered him.

‘You think to lead me on by tricks,’ he stormed sullenly. ‘You think to set on yourself a higher value than you have.’

Miss Julia Roseingrave got to her feet with one graceful movement and set down her blue tea-cup.

‘Have you ever met a proud woman before?’ she asked lazily. ‘Go, and I shall not follow. Turn away, and I shall not beckon you back.’

He was forced to assume a humility that he did not feel.

‘Come, pretty one, there is a full summer’s month before us and I am weary of common delights, and you, I think, have never known them—’

‘Youth goes so fast, is that your common conclusion?’ she jeeringly interrupted. ‘I shall not care when I am old. Youth or age is the same to me.’

‘But not to me,’ he answered, suddenly serious. ‘I hope to die as soon as I lose the first iota of my strength and power.’ Then he fell a-coaxing. ‘Come, play with me a little, pretty one. Take me on the marsh and show me the strange people that live there. Smugglers are there not, and eel-catchers in their huts and old wise women and shepherds who see nothing but their sheep all the year long? Come up with me to the Grange. There are many secrets in that house and I have discovered none of them yet. We will have quests through all those rooms that have been so long since closed.’

‘And raise the ghosts?’ she queried. ‘They say, you know, that the place is cursed.’

‘Maybe. How should that concern us? If we be cursed I doubt if we can avoid our fate. Come up to the Grange, I need an audience for my music. I have put into order some old instruments I found there.’

‘I shall not care for your London airs,’ she replied. I, too, am a musician. I have here, in the next room, a harp and a spinet on which I play very fairly.’

‘No doubt you have all the arts and all the graces,’ he mocked. ‘It is a strange thing to me that you have been shut away here so long. I swear that you have a secret and that I shall surprise it.’

A steady wailing broke the afternoon silence. He had forgotten the imbecile girl and was startled. The sound seemed like the cry of one in mortal distress.

‘It is my sister Phoebe,’ said Miss Roseingrave, with what seemed a malicious pleasure. ‘I told you she would not be long quiet.’

The door opened and the idiot girl entered. She was thin, and dark, and pale, and had a certain likeness to her sister. Her hair straggled from under a white mob cap, she wore an untidy cotton gown and held in her arms a dead white rabbit. Her eyes were vacant, her lips blubbered as she cried and caressed the limp shape of the little animal.

‘See, she has strangled it,’ said Miss Julia, ‘that is how her play always ends. It is the same with the doves and the kittens. You had best go, Sir William. You see we are not a pleasant household.’

But he was not a man to be shocked by cruelty, nor by any strange nor displeasing sight.

He said: ‘Send Goody Cloke up to look after the poor, deranged creature and come abroad with me.’

She replied: ‘It is not duty but lack of interest in your company that bids me stay.’

He snatched at his gloves and his hat, and left the Dower House.

He did not take the path that led under the chestnut trees through the park towards the Grange, but passed on beyond into loneliness.

He skirted a meadow where the moon-daisies grew in the second haysel, where the berries of the arum or cuckoo pint ripened underneath the tangle of the rough bindweed. The stagnant wet beneath the hedges was full of the leaves of the water caltrops.

By these open places he made his way to Ballote Wood. The trees were mostly ash and now the mist had cleared, every leaf on every bough showed clear and vivid in the westering light. It was silent but not absolutely still. Small wild things could be heard running and almost breathing through the shrubs and herbage. After sundry mistakings of his way, for there were no paths in the wood, Sir William reached the pool where he had seen Julia Roseingrave or her wraith bathing. Thrusting aside the sorrel and loosestrife that bordered the sloping side, and lifting the sprays of willow, he looked down into the lilied pool, almost hoping again to behold that white face, that drifting wreath of black hair, but all he saw was the reflection of his own scowling brow and petulant pouting lips and dark town clothes that were an affront to the light and freedom of the day and the careless peace of the place.