Whence could that glow of western light come?  Assuredly not from the low-latticed window which faced eastward, and was generally obscured by a screen of cobwebs.  The room was only used as a storehouse for lumber, and it was nobody’s business to clean the window.

Mary looked in, curious to solve the riddle.  A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman’s particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light.  Seen thus, this little old Dutch garden seemed to Mary the prettiest thing she had ever looked upon.  There were beds of tulips and hyacinths, ranunculus, narcissus, tuberose, making a blaze of colour against the old box borders, a foot high.  The crumbling old brick walls of the outbuildings, and that dungeon-like wall which formed the back of the new house, were clothed with clematis and wistaria, woodbine and magnolia.  All that loving labour could do had been done day by day for the last forty years to make this confined space a thing of beauty.  Mary went out of the dark stable into the sunny garden, and looked round her, full of admiration for James Steadman’s work.

’If ever Jack and I can afford to have a garden, I hope we shall be able to make it like this,’ she thought.  ’It is such a comfort to know that so small a garden can be pretty:  for of course any garden we could afford must be small.’

Lady Mary had no idea that this quadrangle was spacious as compared with the narrow strip allotted to many a suburban villa calling itself ’an eligible residence.’

In the centre of the garden there was an old sundial, with a stone bench at the base, and, as she came upon an opening in the circular yew tree hedge which environed this sundial, and from which the flower beds radiated in a geometrical pattern, Lady Mary was surprised to see an old man—­a very old man—­sitting on this bench, and basking in the low light of the westering sun.

His figure was shrunken and bent, and he sat with his chin resting on the handle of a crutched stick, and his head leaning forward.  His long white hair fell in thin straggling locks over the collar of his coat.  He had an old-fashioned, mummyfied aspect, and Mary thought he must be very, very old.

Very, very old!  In a flash there came back upon her the memory of John Hammond’s curiosity about a hoary and withered old man whom he had met on the Fell in the early morning.  She remembered how she had taken him to see old Sam Barlow, and how he had protested that Sam in no wise resembled the strange-looking old man of the Fell.  And now here, close to the Fell, was a face and figure which in every detail resembled that ancient stranger whom Hammond had described so graphically.

It was very strange.  Could this person be the same her lover had seen two months ago?  And, if so, had he been living at Fellside all the time; or was he only an occasional visitor of Steadman’s?