who chanced to be standing there his way to “The Porch.”  He was directed to ride down the road upon his left hand until he came to the second house, which he could not mistake, for there was a dyke or moat about the garden wall.  He passed the first house a mile further on, and perhaps half a mile beyond that he came to the dyke and the high garden wall, and saw the gables of the second house loom up behind it black against the sky.  A wooden bridge spanned the dyke and led to a wide gate.  Mitchelbourne stopped his horse at the bridge.  The gate stood open and he looked down an avenue of trees into a square of which three sides were made by the high garden wall, and the fourth and innermost by the house.  Thus the whole length of the house fronted him, and it struck him as very singular that neither in the lower nor the upper windows was there anywhere a spark of light, nor was there any sound but the tossing of the branches and the wail of the wind among the chimneys.  Not even a dog barked or rattled a chain, and from no chimney breathed a wisp of smoke.  The house in the gloom of that melancholy evening had a singular eerie and tenantless look; and oppressive silence reigned there; and Mitchelbourne was unaccountably conscious of a growing aversion to it, as to something inimical and sinister.

He had crossed the mouth of a lane, he remembered, just at the first corner of the wall.  The lane ran backwards from the road, parallel with the side wall of the garden.  Mitchelbourne had a strong desire to ride down that lane and inspect the back of the house before he crossed the bridge into the garden.  He was restrained for a moment by the thought that such a proceeding must savour of cowardice.  But only for a moment.  There had been no doubting the genuine nature of Lance’s fears and those fears were very close to Mr. Mitchelbourne now.  They were feeling like cold fingers about his heart.  He was almost in the icy grip of them.

He turned and rode down the lane until he came to the end of the wall.  A meadow stretched behind the house.  Mitchelbourne unfastened the catch of a gate with his riding whip and entered it.  He found himself upon the edge of a pool, which on the opposite side wetted the house wall.  About the pool some elder trees and elms grew and overhung, and their boughs tapped like fingers upon the window-panes.  Mitchelbourne was assured that the house was inhabited, since from one of the windows a strong yellow light blazed, and whenever a sharper gust blew the branches aside, swept across the face of the pool like a flaw of wind.