‘I wish we could see a light,’ Mr. Thomasson said, anxiously looking into the darkness, ‘or a house of any kind.  I wonder where we are.’  She did not speak.

‘I do not know—­even what time it is,’ he continued pettishly; and he shivered.  ‘Take care!’ She had stumbled and nearly fallen.  ’Will you be pleased to take my arm, and we shall be able to proceed more quickly.  I am afraid that your feet are wet.’

Absorbed in her thoughts she did not answer.

‘However the ground is rising,’ he said.  ’By-and-by it will be drier under foot.’

They were an odd couple to be trudging a strange road, in an unknown country, at the dark hour of the night.  The stars must have twinkled to see them.  Mr. Thomasson began to own the influence of solitude, and longed to pat the hand she had passed through his arm—­it was the sort of caress that came natural to him; but for the time discretion withheld him.  He had another temptation:  to refer to the past, to the old past at the College, to the part he had taken at the inn, to make some sort of apology; but again discretion intervened, and he went on in silence.

As he had said, the ground was rising; but the outlook was cheerless enough, until the moon on a sudden emerged from a bank of cloud and disclosed the landscape.  Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry of relief.  Fifty paces before them the low wall on the right of the lane was broken by a pillared gateway, whence the dark thread of an avenue trending across the moonlit flat seemed to point the way to a house.

The tutor pushed the gate open.  ‘Diana favours you, child,’ he said, with a smirk which was lost on Julia.  ’It was well she emerged when she did, for now in a few minutes we shall be safe under a roof.  ’Tis a gentleman’s house too, unless I mistake.’

A more timid or a more suspicious woman might have refused to leave the road, or to tempt the chances of the dark avenue, in his company.  But Julia, whose thoughts were bitterly employed, complied without thought or hesitation, perhaps unconsciously.  The gate swung to behind them, and they plodded a hundred yards between the trees arm in arm; then one and then a second light twinkled out in front.  These as they approached were found to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house.  The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last sparse branches of the elms.

Mr. Thomasson’s exclamation of relief, as he surveyed the building, was cut short by the harsh rattle of a chain, followed by the roar of a watch-dog, as it bounded from the kennel; in a second a horrid raving and baying, as of a score of hounds, awoke the night.  The startled tutor came near to dropping his companion’s hand, but fortunately the threshold, dimly pillared and doubtfully Palladian, was near, and resisting the impulse to put himself back to back with the girl—­for the protection of his calves rather than her skirts—­the reverend gentleman hurried to occupy it.  Once in that coign of refuge, he hammered on the door with the energy of a frightened man.