Would he be there?  He laughed aloud as he put the question to himself.  A Bradshaw was on his table.  He caught it up, found that there was a train that could be caught in thirty-five minutes’ time, and clapped on his hat and—­caught it.

That night he slept at the inn of the Three Desires—­which, as you may possibly know, lies but a gunshot beyond the boundary wall of the glebe of Lyntonhurst Old Church—­slept with an alarm clock at his head and every servant at the inn from the boots to the barmaid tipped a shilling to see that he did not oversleep himself.

He was up before any of them, however—­up and out into the pearl-dusk of the morning before ever the alarm-clock shrilled its first note, or the sun’s sheen slid lower than the spurs of the weather-cock on the spire of Lyntonhurst Old Church—­and twice he had walked past the big gates and looked up the still avenue to the windows of the huge house whose roof covered her before Lyntonhurst Old Church spoke up through the dawn-hush and told the parish it was half-past four o’clock.

By five, he had found a pool cupped in the beech woods with mallows and marsh marigolds and a screen of green things all round it and a tent of blue sky over the sun-touched tree tops; and had stripped and splashed into it and set all the birds to flight with the harsher song of human things; by seven he was back at the Three Desires; by eight he had shaved and changed and breakfasted and was out again in the fields and the leafy lanes, and by nine he was at the lich-gate of the church.

CHAPTER XXXI

She was there already; sitting far back at the end of one of the narrow wooden side benches with the shadow of the gate’s moss-grown roof and of the big cypress above it partly screening her, her shrinking position evincing a desire to escape general observation as clearly as her pale face and nervously drumming hand betrayed a state of extreme agitation.

She rose as Cleek lifted the latch and came in, and advanced to meet him with both hands outstretched in greeting and a rich colour staining all her face.

“I knew that you would come—­I was as certain of it as I am now this minute,” she said with a little embarrassed laugh, then dropped her eyes and said no more, for he had taken those two hands in his and was holding them tightly and looking at her with an expression that was half a reproach and half a caress.

“I am glad you did not doubt,” he said, with an odd, wistful little smile.  “It is good to know one’s friends have faith in one, Miss Lorne.  I had almost come to believe that you had forgotten me.”

“Because I did not write?  Oh, but I could not—­indeed I could not.  I have been spending days and nights in a house of mourning—­Lady Chepstow gave me leave of absence; and my heart was so full I did not write even to her.  I have been trying to soothe and to comfort a distracted girl, a half-crazed old man, a bereft and horribly smitten family.  I have been doing all in my power to put hope and courage into the heart of a despairing and most unhappy lover.”