But they paid no heed to her—­for, of course, she was mad.  Neither did Gregory Jeffray hear aught as he went out, but the water lapping against the little boat that was still half full of flowers.

The days went by, and being added together one at a time, they made the years.  And the years grew into one decade, and lengthened out towards another.

Aunt Annie was long dead, a white stone over her; but there was no stone over Grace Allen—­only a green mound where daisies grew.

Sir Gregory Jeffray came that way.  He was a great law-officer of the Crown, and first heir to the next vacant judgeship.  This, however, he was thinking of refusing because of the greatness of his private practice.

He had come to shoot at the Barr, and his baggage was at Barmark station.  How strange it would be to see the old places again in the gloom of a September evening!

Gregory still loved a new sensation.  All was so long past—­the bitterness clean gone out of it.  The old boathouse had fallen into other hands, and railways had come to carry the traffic beyond the ferry.

As Sir Gregory Jeffray walked from the late train which set him down at the station, he felt curiously at peace.  The times of the Long Ago came back not ungratefully to his mind.  There had been much pleasure in them.  He even thought kindly of the girl with whom he had walked in the glory of a forgotten summer along the hidden ways of the woods.  Her last letter, long since destroyed, was not disagreeable to him when he thought of the secret which had been laid to rest so quietly in the pool of the Black Water.

He came to the water’s edge.  He sent his voice, stronger now than of yore, but without the old ring of boyish hopefulness, across the loch.  A moment’s silence, the whisper of the night wind, and then from the gloom of the farther side an answering hail—­low, clear, and penetrating.

“I am in luck to find them out of bed,” said Gregory Jeffray to himself.

He waited and listened.  The wind blew chill from the south athwart the ferry.  He shivered, and drew his fur-lined travelling-coat about him.  He could hear the water lapping against the mighty piers of the railway viaduct above, which, with its gaunt iron spans, like bows bent to send arrows into the heavens, dimly towered between him and the skies.

Now, this is all that men definitely know of the fate of Sir Gregory Jeffray.  A surfaceman who lived in the new houses above the landing-place saw him standing there, heard him hailing the Waterfoot of the Dee, to which no boat had plied for years.  Maliciously he let the stranger call, and abode to see what should happen.

Yet astonishment held him dumb when again across the dark stream came the crying, thrilling him with an unknown terror, till he clutched the door to make sure of his retreat within.  Mastering his fear, he stole nearer till he could hear the oars planted in the iron pins, the push off the shore, and then the measured dip of oars coming towards the stranger across the pool of the Black Water.