The furniture consisted of a very old refectory table, the top of which must have been at least four inches in thickness, a long form and a high chair that looked like a bishop’s throne. There were no visible windows, but the ceiling did not quite reach the wall, and there seemed a space all round the room where air was admitted.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He took the thing he had been carrying, unrolled it, and, to her astonishment, kissed it passionately before he carried it to a truckle bed that she had not noticed before, and tacked it to a beam which showed between the stone courses and was in truth the only wood she had seen in the building.

She looked in amazement, and knew the picture instantly. It was the head of his mother.

“How lovely!” he sighed. “How wonderful! Do you know, I feel that nothing matters now, Leslie!”

He smiled at her, and looked at that moment so happy that she could have cried.

“Richard hated her,” he went on. “He never lost an opportunity of speaking ill of her. I am told that in my absence he used to bring the servants into the library, and together they would laugh and gibe at this beautiful martyr.”

“How absurd, Harry! You know Dick would do no such thing,” she said, stirred to his defence.

But he was neither angry nor did he show any resentment at her championship.

“You don’t know Dick,” he said simply. “Dick, of course, is the Black Abbot. I only found it out a week or two ago, when I went into his room and discovered the costume in a box. He had forgotten to put it away.”

She did not believe the only truth he had told her so far, but she felt that it would be undiplomatic, to say the least, to argue with him.

“Harry, I can’t stay here, you know,” she said. “There is only one room, and I have a weakness for a daily bath–”

He walked across the room and pulled aside a sacking that hid one corner, and pointed dramatically.

“You will find everything you require here,” he said. “This room is yours. I shall sleep upstairs, only coming below at the first hint of danger, either to you or to me. The position calls for courage and patience, and I know that my wife-to-be has those qualities to excess.”

He was his old, smiling, genial self.

“By the way, there are plenty of books to read – I brought some away from the house. They were rather heavy and I had to drag them a little bit, but thank heaven I got just what I wanted.”

She noticed them now for the first time, piled at one end of the refectory table. He took up a volume and turned the leaves lovingly.