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Sir William went on steadily towards the Dower House. His startled thoughts had at first leapt in amaze, but afterwards it seemed to him that if his wife had followed him it were but a reasonable thing and what he should have expected. He ought to have known the lengths to which her fidelity, devotion, and innocent affection would drive her. When he had burnt her letters, one after another, holding them in a candle, and watching with delight the thin paper curl, he ought to have realised he would not be rid of her so easily.

And now she was at the Dower House and in the power of Julia Roseingrave. Julia must know by now his deception. Had she herself written the message in the uncouth characters and thrown it where he was sure to meet it on his path? How would she take this strange turn, but two days off her wedding? His mood became dark, sullen, and dangerous. He had planned it all so neatly, and all had gone so smoothly. Why should he have supposed that in this remote place any evil chance would find him out? But he knew only too well that there was no hiding from destiny.

When he came in sight of the brick façade of the house with the ripening woodbine over the door and the last carnations blowing sweetly in the neat garden, he vowed in his soul that come what may he would not lose Julia Roseingrave and he felt a deep anger against his innocent wife, who, in a folly of love, had thus thwarted his designs.

Miss Julia did not come at once when he knocked, but when she did open the door to him her face was stormy and her greeting cold.

‘I told you to stay away from me till our wedding-day,’ she said.

‘I could not, Julia, I love you too much. You are in my thoughts day and night. You come between me and sleep.’

She allowed him to enter the parlour. The foxgloves were gone from the table. As she seated herself in a haughty and displeased acquiescence in his presence, he saw at once that she was not going to tell him of her visitor. She, then, had not written the paper, and he wondered what he should do. His mood became, like hers, exasperated and dangerous.

She fenced with him for a little while, talking of indifferent matters and basing her coldness and her displeasure on his breaking of the rule she had laid down that he was not to try to see her till their wedding morning. But her arts were of little avail with him. All the course of his licentious and lawless life he had not been used to intrigue or to subtle meanings, so he broke bluntly and impatiently through her fine and delicate sentences.

‘I found this on my path just now, Julia, as I came through the chestnut trees. Is it a trick or a jest? and he held out to her the fly-leaf of the Bible on which was painfully traced the message from the paralytic woman.

Miss Julia Roscingrave betrayed herself by a hot flush of anger, and a quiver in her voice in which she said:

‘Who dared write that? Did Phoebe, after all, understand?

‘My wife is here, then,’ said Sir William Notley, coldly, returning the paper to his breast pocket, ‘now, why did you conceal that from me, Juha?’

‘Why did you conceal from me that you had a wife at all?’ she demanded passionately. Then, staying his reply, with a contemptuous gesture she answered herself. ‘But I should know you thought I was a rustic fool, to be easily caught and so I was such a fool and so caught.’

‘Why should you think,’ he demanded scornfully, ‘that I was not married? Did you think at my age with my rank that I should be still free? And if I had been, do you suppose that I should have married you?’

‘I had very little experience,’ said Miss Roseingrave, ‘and I was deceived.’

‘I do not believe you,’ he said. ‘It suited you to pretend to be deceived.’

‘Leave it like that, then, Sir William, it matters very little now. I have been saved in time.’

‘Saved from me, do you mean? Indeed, Julia, you do not know what you are talking about. The fact that this poor foolish woman has come here will make no difference, none at all. I must and will have you.’

She smiled without answering, and maddened by her coldness, he added:

‘If you wish for the wedding to deceive those about here, let us have it, and on some excuse I will send this poor fool back to the city.’

‘She will not go,’ said Miss Roseingrave. ‘She loves you. I wonder why? You are a worthless man.’

‘Do not you love me, Julia?’

‘I intend to marry you,’ she replied, and he was angered that she should be such a powerful magnet of attraction to him, when he could get no confession of passion from her cool lips.

This sudden and unexpected obstacle caused by the arrival of his wife further inflamed his wild illicit desire for Julia Roseingrave, a desire that seemed to him like a fever, something not quite normal, nor quite sane, so that sometimes it seemed to him that she had indeed bewitched him or cast some spell upon his senses.

It was not love, this passion, and sometimes it was near to hate. Now, as he sat quite close to her in the neat, overcrowded parlour he felt a sensation of repulsion—a desire to escape from the room, the house, the company of the woman; he felt that beneath all this parade of decorum and prudery there lay some trap, and again he seemed to hear that high, thin voice calling a warning.

His sight seemed affected and he struggled against the hallucination that the room was full of phantoms, moving, tall grey figures who came and went, and circled round and about the erect lovely shape, and cold smooth face of Miss Julia Roscingrave.

‘The strain is intolerable,’ he muttered, ‘and I detest this place. We must get away. What does it matter about my wife? She can return as she came.’

‘Have you no care at all, then, for her safety? Is not her dignity and honour something involved in yours?’

‘I cannot think about that now. She has her own relatives. She is a woman who will take care of herself, she is very nice and fastidious.’

He scarcely knew what he said.

‘She is sleeping upstairs,’ said Miss Roseingrave, ‘would you like to go and see her?’

‘No, no,’ he said violently.

‘She has brought with her your portrait, and that of your children. She seems a good, sweet, gentle fool.’

‘I never wish to see her again. She must not come between you and me, Julia.’

‘She has come. She is your wife, and I, as I told you before, will not belong to you on any other terms than that of marriage.’

He felt impotent before her, corrupt and debased even from his own low standard. He had already understood her meaning and cried out in rage, because the solution that she now offered to him was unescapable and inevitable, was one that had come to him when he picked up the letter on the path under the chestnut trees, and one, too, that he had rejected with instantaneous horror, and now, in a sudden flash of terror, he saw that what Miss Julia Roseingrave proposed was not by any means to be rejected or slighted. He was in her snare, he could not lose her nor slight her…

‘No one knows she is here,’ said Miss Julia Roseingrave, speaking quietly, with her hands folded in her lap. And she related to his sullen silence the tale that Lady Notley had related.

‘I should have expected it. I daresay her letters that I destroyed gave me some warning of it,’ he said, with dull fury. ‘But I did not wish to break the enchantment. Yes, it is as if I had been under an enchantment here. I want to forget her and all the old life.’

And then, undisciplined and fickle, violent and sudden as he was, he began to struggle against his destiny, which he read clearly enough in the lustrous dark eyes of Julia Roseingrave.

‘Cannot we go away together, you and I, and leave the poor fool alone? I shall never look at her again if you are jealous of her.’

‘Jealous,’ interrupted Julia, ‘not I!’

‘Will nothing please you,’ he pleaded, ‘but to be my wife? I must have you and that you know. But here is a price I would never pay. Had this fond wretch never come to interrupt us I would have married you and you would have been my wife for all you had known. We would have gone abroad together.’

‘You babble nonsense,’ she interrupted. ‘I should have found out and quite soon. As soon as I had left these solitudes and gone into the world the truth would have been manifest and then I should have hated you, and perhaps I should have—’

She paused, but he understood what she would have said.

‘I daresay you know a few dangerous secrets,’ he muttered. ‘You mean that you would have revenged yourself on me.’

‘I want,’ she said, ‘some of the prizes and honours of the world or nothing. I have been content in this desolation, for I have had sharp and sweet dreams, and if you take those from me you must give me something else. I shall be your wife and mistress of all you own, or I shall remain here, forgetting you quite easily and live as I lived before, on phantoms.’

‘You talk and talk but to torment me, for you know that I cannot forgo you. I believe that you have given me some potion to drink.’ Then he broke off and asked distractedly: ‘What do you intend to do? We are in a far corner of the world here, but, remember, we are still in it. Do nothing that will put you in peril.’

‘I shall do nothing at all,’ she said, ‘it was all in my hands and I intended to settle it by myself. I and Goody Cloke. Now you have interfered you may take it on to yourself.’

‘I?’ he asked, and terror flashed in his eyes. ‘You want me to do it?’

‘Why, certainly. If you want me it should not be so much to you to destroy what comes between us.’

‘To destroy!’ he echoed.

‘Well, perhaps you are sorry for her!’ mocked Miss Roseingrave. ‘Perhaps you think of your two young children and all she endured for your sake, the tender, innocent love she still bears for you. Well, if these things influence you, you may go upstairs and take her by the hand and go on your knees and beg her to forgive you, and go away with her and leave me here alone.’

‘You know,’ he muttered in agony, ‘that I cannot do this. You and I are bound together, by some horrid mischance, perhaps, Julia, but bound together none the less. And if marriage is the only way—’

‘Nothing else concerns me,’ she said. ‘I wish to be Lady Notley.’

And he laughed because her intention and her words sat grotesquely together. And behind his own voice he heard again and very faintly, the shrill warning echo.

‘She need not suffer,’ he said sullenly.

‘Why, no, Mother Cloke is very skilful. She will make a cordial that you shall give her and that will set her at rest for ever.’

‘I cannot do it, Julia. I cannot see her, and do this.’

‘You must. I desire you to do it. There is no escape. It must be quickly before anyone knows that she is here.’

Miss Roseingrave rose and approached him, speaking in a low, rapid whisper, that he listened to, fascinated as if indeed this were an incantation that she wove about his excited and bewildered senses.

He had an even deeper impression than before, that mysterious figures wove a mystic dance round about her and that the small, neat parlour was crowded with menacing phantoms.

‘She will wake presently and I shall go up to her, and say that I have sent a message to the Grange, telling you of her arrival here and bidding you to come. And then she will be soothed and calmed and I shall help her make herself neat. She will come down and receive you here, and I shall come in as the pleasant, agreeable hostess and hand you a drink that you must not touch yourself but give to her. Then all will be over quite suddenly.’

‘Why should you put this on to me? Why should you not take this terrible sin on your own head and hands? You gain the prize.’

He spoke thickly, from a wilderness of dreams, pressed on him very closely.

‘Prize!’ she cried. ‘Am I no prize?’

And overpowered by the force of her and the strong truth of what she said, he went down on his knees and buried his face in the thin silk cushion, stuffed with hops for drowsiness, that lay on the little sofa.

‘Never mind for what comes after,’ she said, standing erect over him. ‘What troubled sleep or restless dreams or flat disappointment. We have made our bargain and resolved to put it through. And shall this poor, slight thing come between us? And it can be done so easily.’

He looked up at her, his face haggard between the fallen dark locks.

‘And afterwards?’

‘Afterwards it will be so easy,’ said she, swiftly understanding him. ‘You and I and Mother Cloke will take her out after it is dark and down to Ballote Wood. There has been a long drought, but the rain will come soon. Mother Cloke says so and she is always right—the pond, where you saw me bathing—’

‘It was you, then?’ he asked dully.

‘Who should it be but I? That pond is nearly dry now, the lily roots are all exposed to the sun and rotting. There we may easily dig—the ground is soft, and anything placed there would sink immediately. And afterwards, when the rain comes, all will be hidden, and the lilies will grow again and no one will ever go searching near there for the place is supposed to be haunted.’

Miss Roseingrave lifted her lip at his silence.

‘Could she have a better end? It is pleasanter for her this way than to live married to you.’

Then, as he did not move, she added:

‘You are very faint-hearted. Is this worse than other things you have done?’

He rose to his feet and tried to menace her.

‘Why should I not have my own way? Why should you plan this for me? You are fixing a dark stain on my soul that I shall never efface. This place is indeed cursed and haunted.’

He began to rave and to lament. She placed a cool, long hand on his arm, and bade him be silent, and then he shuddered with a baser fear.

‘Have we been overheard? You trust Mother Cloke, you say? Why should we? Is it safe?’

‘I will answer for her,’ said Miss Roseingrave.

But his mean terror was not to be assuaged so easily. ‘And the letter? Who dropped the letter in my path?’

‘That must be some trick on the part of Phoebe,’ she frowned. ‘The girl is an idiot, and even if she should speak she will not be listened to.’

Sir William said: ‘I never thought to be so under anyone’s domination as I am under yours. The time will come when your spell will break and I shall loathe you.’

He would have said more and fallen to raging again, but she stemmed the torrent of his words by saying coldly:

‘Begone, and come again about nine o’clock when it is quite dark.’

And he left her and returned to Holcot Grange.