’If it was memory that wrung that agonised shriek from her just now, her recollections of the past must be very terrible.’

‘Ah, sir, there is a skeleton in every house,’ answered James Steadman, gravely.

This was exactly what Maulevrier had said under the yew trees which Wordsworth planted.

‘Good-night, sir,’ said Steadman.

’Good-night.  You are sure that Lady Maulevrier may be left safely—­that there is no fear of illness of any kind?’

‘No, sir.  It was only a bad dream.  Good-night, sir.’

Steadman went back to his own quarters.  Mr. Hammond heard him draw the bolts of the swing door, thus cutting off all communication with the corridor.

The eight-day clock on the staircase struck two as Mr. Hammond returned to his room, even less inclined for sleep than when he left it.  Strange, that nocturnal disturbance of a mind which seemed so tranquil in the day.  Or was that tranquillity only a mask which her ladyship wore before the world:  and was the bitter memory of events which happened forty years ago still a source of anguish to that highly strung nature?

‘There are some minds which cannot forget,’ John Hammond said to himself, as he meditated upon her ladyship’s character and history.  ’The story of her husband’s crime may still be fresh in her memory, though it is only a tradition for the outside world.  His crime may have involved some deep wrong done to herself, some outrage against her love and faith as a wife.  One of the stories Maulevrier spoke of the other day was of a wicked woman’s influence upon the governor—­a much more likely story than that of any traffic in British interests or British honour, which would have been almost impossible for a man in Lord Maulevrier’s position.  If the scandal was of a darker kind—­a guilty wife—­the mysterious disappearance of a husband—­the horror of the thing may have made a deeper impression on Lady Maulevrier than even her nearest and dearest dream of:  and that superb calm which she wears like a royal mantle may be maintained at the cost of struggles which tear her heart-strings.  And then at night, when the will is dormant, when the nervous system is no longer ruled by the power of waking intelligence, the old familiar agony returns, the hated images flash back upon the brain, and in proportion to the fineness of the temperament is the intensity of the dreamer’s pain.’

And then he went on to reflect upon the long monotonous years spent in that lonely house, shut in from the world by those everlasting hills.  Albeit the house was an ideal house, set in a landscape of infinite beauty, the monotony must be none the less oppressive for a mind burdened with dark memories, weighed down by sorrows which could seek no relief from sympathy, which could never become familiarised by discussion.

’I wonder that a woman of Lady Maulevrier’s intellect should not have better known how to treat her own malady,’ thought Hammond.