“The nursery door’s open,” she said.  He turned, and saw very clearly, against the half-light, her startled eyes.  Her hands were pressed against her dress and holly had fallen at her feet.  He saw, too, that the nursery door was ajar.

“I locked it myself, yesterday; you saw me.”

She gasped as though she had been running, and he saw that her face was white.

He moved forward quickly and pushed open the door.  The room itself was lightened by the gleam from the passage and also by the moonlight that came dimly through the window.  The shadow of some great tree was flung upon the floor.  He saw, at once, that the room was changed.  The rocking-horse that had been yesterday against the wall had now been dragged far across the floor.  The white front of the dolls’-house had swung open and the furniture was disturbed as though some child had been interrupted in his play.  Four large dolls sat solemnly round a dolls’ tea-table, and a dolls’ tea service was arranged in front of them.  In the very centre of the room a fine castle of bricks had been rising, a perfect Tower of Babel in its frustrated ambition.

The shadow of the great tree shook and quivered above these things.

Seymour saw Mrs. Trenchard’s face, he heard her whisper: 

“Who is it?  What is it?”

Then she fell upon her knees near the tower of bricks.  She gazed at them, stared round the rest of the room, then looked up at him, saying very quietly: 

“I knew that they would come back one day.  I always waited.  It must have been they.  Only Francis ever built the bricks like that, with the red ones in the middle.  He always said they must be....”

She broke off and then, with her hands pressed to her face, cried, so softly and so gently that she made scarcely any sound.

Seymour left her.

V

He passed through the house without any one seeing him, crossed the common, and went up to his bedroom at the inn.  He sat down before his window with his back to the room.  He flung the rattling panes wide.

The room looked out across on to the moor, and he could see, in the moonlight, the faint thread of the beginning of the Borhaze Road.  To the left of this there was some sharp point of light, some cottage perhaps.  It flashed at him as though it were trying to attract his attention.  The night was so magical, the world so wonderful, so without bound or limit, that he was prepared now to wait, passively, for his experience.  That point of light was where the Scarecrow used to be, just where the brown fields rise up against the horizon.  In all his walks to-day he had deliberately avoided that direction.  The Scarecrow would not be there now; he had always in his heart fancied it there, and he would not change that picture that he had of it.  But now the light flashed at him.  As he stared at it he knew that to-day he had completed that adventure that had begun for him many years ago, on that Christmas Eve when he had met Mr. Pidgen.