These things Harold realised most clearly in the heavy days which followed that churchyard separation.

He took his punishment like a brave man indeed, and went about his daily occupations with a steadfast face, but his bold behaviour did not lessen its weight.  He had promised not to go away till Ida was married and he would keep the promise, but in his heart he wondered how he should bear the sight of her.  What would it be to see her, to touch her hand, to hear the rustle of her dress and the music of her beloved voice, and to realise again and yet again that all these things were not for him, that they had passed from him into the ownership of another man?

On the day following that upon which Edward Cossey had been terrified into transferring the Honham mortgages to Mr. Quest the Colonel went out shooting.  He had lately become the possessor of a new hammerless gun by a well-known London maker, of which he stood in considerable need.  Harold had treated himself to this gun when he came into his aunt’s little fortune, but it was only just completed.  The weapon was a beautiful one, and at any other time it would have filled his sportsman’s heart with joy.  Even as it was, when he put it together and balanced it and took imaginary shots at blackbirds in the garden, for a little while he forgot his sorrows, for the woe must indeed be heavy which a new hammerless gun by such a maker cannot do something towards lightening.  So on the next morning he took this gun and went to the marshes by the river—­where, he was credibly informed, several wisps of snipe had been seen—­to attempt to shoot some of them and put the new weapon to the test.

It was on this same morning that Edward Cossey got a letter which disturbed him not a little.  It was from Belle Quest, and ran thus: 

 “Dear Mr. Cossey,—­Will you come over and see me this afternoon
  about three o’clock?  I shall expect you, so I am sure you will
  not disappoint me.—­B.Q.”

For a long while he hesitated what to do.  Belle Quest was at the present juncture the very last person whom he wished to see.  His nerves were shaken and he feared a scene, but on the other hand he did not know what danger might threaten him if he refused to go.  Quest had got his price, and he knew that he had nothing more to fear from him; but a jealous woman has no price, and if he did not humour her it might, he felt, be at a risk which he could not estimate.  Also he was nervously anxious to give no further cause for gossip.  A sudden outward and visible cessation of his intimacy with the Quests might, he thought, give rise to surmises and suspicion in a little country town like Boisingham, where all his movements were known.  So, albeit with a faint heart, he determined to go.

Accordingly, at three o’clock precisely, he was shown into the drawing-room at the Oaks.  Mrs. Quest was not there; indeed he waited for ten minutes before she came in.  She was pale, so pale that the blue veins on her forehead showed distinctly through her ivory skin, and there was a curious intensity about her manner which frightened him.  She was very quiet also, unnaturally so, indeed; but her quiet was of the ominous nature of the silence before the storm, and when she spoke her words were keen, and quick, and vivid.