“You see, the time is coming when I shall have to go back to London.”

There was a tone and slight tremble in his words. It was to this, not to the words themselves, which Barbara made reply.

“Will anyone dare say we shall not meet again?”

“The sort of God you believe in would probably not say it,” he answered. “But the sort of God my mother believes in would.”

“I know nothing about other people’s Gods. Indeed,” she added, “I know very little about my own. But I want to know more, and Mr. Wingfold is teaching me.”

“Take care he doesn’t talk you into anything. Only I doubt he would try to do that.”

“He will persuade me of nothing that doesn’t seem to me true—be certain of that, Richard. And if it please God to part us, I will pray to him to let us meet again. You have been very good to me.”

Richard was not elated by her words. He only thought, “How kind of her!”

Barbara turned her mare across the road, and sent her at the hedge. Miss Brown cleared it like a stag, and took a bee-line along the grass for Wylder Hall.

Richard stood astonished. A moment before she was close beside him, and now she was nearly out of his sight! Though Richard could shoe a horse, he could not for a moment have stuck to Miss Brown over that hedge. He watched till she vanished, then turned toward Mortgrange.

He was as much in love with Barbara as a man could be who indulged no hope whatever of marrying her—who was not even tempted to build the humblest castle for her in the air of possibility. But so far was his love from causing in him any kind of selfish absorption, that his heart was much troubled at Alice’s leaving him without a farewell. Her behaviour woke in him his first sense of the inexplicable—he little thought of its being but the first visible vapour of a mystery that involved both his past and his future. All he knew was that the sister of his friend had, in a stormy night in London, fled from him as from a wild beast, and that now, on a quiet morning in the country, she was gone from his grandfather’s house without a word of farewell.

“There must be a reason for everything,” he said to himself, “but some reasons are hard to find!”

22. Vixen

— Twenty-Two —

Vixen

The next day, before noon, Richard was busy as usual in the library. Doors and windows were shut against draughts, for he was working with gold-leaf on the tooling of an ancient binding. A door opened, and in came the goblin of the house.