And then with a profound sigh he muttered, ’Harmless, quite harmless.  You may trust him anywhere.  Memory a blank, a blank, a blank, my lord!’

His head sank lower upon his breast, and again he sighed, the sigh of a spirit in torment, Mary thought.  Her vivid imagination was already interested, her quick sympathies were awakened.

She looked at him wonderingly, compassionately.  So old, so infirm, and with a mind astray; and yet there were indications in his speech and manner that told of reason struggling against madness, like the light behind storm-clouds.  He had tones that spoke of a keen sensitiveness to pain, not the lunatic’s imbecile placidity.  She observed him intently, trying to make out what manner of man he was.

He did not belong to the peasant class:  of that she felt assured.  The shrunken, tapering hand had never worked at peasant’s work.  The profile turned towards her was delicate to effeminacy.  The man’s clothes were shabby and old-fashioned, but they were a gentleman’s garments, the cloth of a finer texture than she had ever seen worn by her brother.  The coat, with its velvet collar, was of an old-world fashion.  She remembered having seen just such a coat in an engraved portrait of Count d’Orsay, a print nearly fifty years old.  No Dalesman born and bred ever wore such a coat; no tailor in the Dales could have made it.

The old man looked up after a long pause, during which Mary felt afraid to move.  He looked at her again with inquiring eyes, as if her presence there had only just become known to him.

‘Who are you?’ he asked again.

‘I told you my name just now.  I am Mary Haselden.’

’Haselden—­that is a name I knew—­once.  Mary?  I think my mother’s name was Mary.  Yes, yes, I remember that.  You have a sweet face, Mary—­like my mother’s.  She had brown eyes, like yours, and auburn hair.  You don’t recollect her, perhaps?’

‘Alas! poor maniac,’ thought Mary, ’you have lost all count of time.  Fifty years to you in the confusion of your distraught brain, are but as yesterday.’

‘No, of course not, of course not,’ he muttered; ’how should she recollect my mother, who died while I was a boy?  Impossible.  That must be half a century ago.’

‘Good evening to you,’ said Mary, rising with a great effort, so strong was her feeling of being spellbound by the uncanny old man, ’I must go indoors now.’

He stretched out his withered old hand, small, semi-transparent, with the blue veins showing darkly under the parchment-coloured skin, and grasped Mary’s arm.

‘Don’t go,’ he pleaded.  ’I like your face, child; I like your voice—­I like to have you here.  What do you mean by going indoors?  Where do you live?’

‘There,’ said Mary, pointing to the dead wall which faced them.  ’In the new part of Fellside House.  I suppose you are staying in the old part with James Steadman.’

She had made up her mind that this crazy old man must be a relation of Steadman’s to whom he gave hospitality either with or without her ladyship’s consent.  All powerful as Lady Maulevrier had ever been in her own house, it was just possible that now, when she was a prisoner in her own rooms, certain small liberties might be taken, even by so faithful a servant as Steadman.