The October evening had fallen when Tatham put his mother into the motor, and stood, his hands in his pockets—­uncomfortable and disapproving—­on the steps of Duddon, watching the bright lights disappearing down the long avenue.  What could she do?  He hated to think of her in the old miser’s house, browbeaten and perhaps insulted, when he was not there to protect her.

However she was gone, on what he was certain would prove a futile errand, and he turned heavily back into the house.

The head keeper was waiting in the inner hall, in search of orders for a small “shoot” of neighbours on the morrow, planned some weeks before.

“Arrange it as you like, Thurston!” said Tatham hurriedly, as he came in sight of the man, a magnificent grizzled fellow in gaiters and a green uniform.  “I don’t care where we go.”

“I thought perhaps the Colley Wood beat, my lord—­”

“Yes, capital.  That’ll do.  I leave it to you.  Sorry I can’t stay to talk it over.  Good-night!”

“There’s a pair of foxes, my lord, in the Nowers spinney that have been doing a shocking amount of damage lately....”

But the door of the library was already shut.  Thurston went away, both astonished and aggrieved.  There were few things he liked better than a chat with the young fellow whom he had taught to hold a gun; and Tatham was generally the most accessible of masters and the keenest of sportsmen, going into every detail of the shooting parties himself, with an unfailing spirit.

Meanwhile Victoria was speeding eastward in her motor along the Pengarth road.  Darkness was fast rushing on.  To her left she saw the spreading waste of Flitterdale Common, its great stretches of moss livid in the dusk:  and beyond it, westward, the rounded tops and slopes of the range that runs from Great Dodd to Helvellyn.  Presently she made out, in the distance, looking southward from the high-level road on which the car was running, the great enclosure of Threlfall Park, on either side of the river which ran between her and Flitterdale; the dim line of its circling wall; its scattered woods; and farther on, the square mass of the Tower itself, black above the trees.

The car stopped at a gate, a dark and empty lodge beside it.  The footman jumped down.  Was the gate locked?—­and must she go round to Whitebeck, and make her attack from that side?  No, the gate swung open, and in sped the car.

Victoria sat upright, her mood strung to an intensity which knew no fears.  It was twenty years since she had last seen Edmund Melrose, and it was thirty years and more since she had rescued her sister from his grasp, and the duel between herself and him had ended in her final victory.