But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura’s maid to ask a question for her mistress had diverted the doctor’s thoughts and spared Falloden reply.

* * * * *

A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had been so intimate and familiar a part of himself that the thought of being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed merely absurd.

September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of their August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze.  The level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and kingship:  and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening purple.  The castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows, a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine maidens through the blue water.

And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he and his kindred knew it no more.  What did the plight of its last owner matter to it, or to the woods and hills?  He tried to think of that valley a hundred years hence—­a thousand!—­and felt himself the merest insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young.  But only for a moment.  Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of personality—­of man’s dominance over nature—­of the Nietzschean “will to power.”  To be strong, to be sufficient to one’s self; not to yield, but to be forever counterattacking circumstance, so as to be the master of circumstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike—­that seemed to be the best, the only creed left to him.

When he reached the Scarfedale house, and a gardener had taken his horse, the maid who opened the door told him he would find Lady Constance on the lawn.  The old ladies were out driving.

Very decent of the old ladies, he thought, as he followed the path into the garden.

There she was!—­her light form lost, almost, in a deep chair, under a lime-tree.  The garden was a tangle of late blooming flowers; everything growing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and the sun as possible, before the first frost made execution.  It was surrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was full of droning bees, and wagtails stepping daintily over the lawns.

Connie rose and came towards him.  She was in black with pale pink roses in her hat.  In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest, gracefullest thing, and as she neared him, she lifted her deep brown eyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautiful they were.

“It was kind of you to come!” she said shyly.

He made no reply, till she had placed him beside her under the lime.  Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.