‘Then I will come here to see you.’

‘You must keep it a secret, then,’ said the old man, with a crafty look.  ’If you don’t they will shut me up in the house, perhaps.  They don’t like me to see people, for fear I should talk.  I have heard Steadman say so.  Yet what should I talk about, heaven help me?  Steadman says my memory is quite gone, and that I am childish and harmless—­childish and harmless.  I have heard him say that.  You’ll come again, won’t you, and you’ll keep it a secret?’

Mary deliberated for a few minutes.

‘I don’t like secrets,’ she said, ’there is generally something dishonourable in them.  But this would be an innocent secret, wouldn’t it?  Well, I’ll come to see you somehow, poor old man; and if Steadman sees me here I will make everything right with him.’

‘He mustn’t see you here,’ said the old man.  ’If he does he will shut me up in my own rooms again, as he did once, years and years ago.’

‘But you have not been here long, have you?’ Mary asked, wonderingly.

’A hundred years, at least.  That’s what it seems to me sometimes.  And yet there are times when it seems only a dream.  Be sure you come again to-morrow.’

‘Yes, I promise you to come; good-night.’

‘Good-night.’

Mary went back to the stable.  The door was still open, but how could she be sure that it would be open to-morrow?  There was no other access that she knew of to the quadrangle, except through the old part of the house, and that was at times inaccessible to her.

She found a key—­a big old rusty key—­in the inside of the door, so she shut and locked it, and put the key in her pocket.  The door she supposed had been left open by accident; at any rate this key made her mistress of the situation.  If any question should arise as to her conduct she could have an explanation with Steadman; but she had pledged her word to the poor mad old man, and she meant to keep her promise, if possible.

As she left the stable she saw Steadman riding towards the gate on his grey cob.  She passed him as she went back to the house.

Next day, and the day after that, and for many days, Mary used her key, and went into the quadrangle at sundown to sit for half an hour or so with the strange old man, who seemed to take an intense pleasure in her company.  The weather was growing warmer as May wore on towards June, and this evening hour, between six and seven, was deliciously bright and balmy.  The seat by the sundial was screened on every side by the clipped yew hedge, dense and tall, surrounding the circular, gravelled space, in the centre of which stood the old granite dial, with its octagonal pedestal and moss-grown steps.  There, as in a closely-shaded arbour, Lady Mary and her old friend were alone and unobserved.  The yew-tree boundary was at least eight feet high, and Mary and her companion could hardly have been seen even from the upper windows of the low, old house.