I found my way out by the back door through which Jervaise and I had entered all those incalculable hours ago; and I looked up at the window from which Anne’s beautiful voice had hailed me out of the night.  I wanted to think about her, to recall how she had looked and spoken—­at that window; in the course of her talk with Frank Jervaise; in the recent scene in the farm sitting-room when she had ambushed herself so persistently behind the ear of the settle; and, most of all, I desired to weigh every tone and expression I could remember in that last long conversation of ours; every least gesture or attention that might give me a hope of having won, in some degree, her regard or interest.

But the perplexing initiative of my intelligence would not, for some reason, permit me to concentrate my thoughts on her at that moment.  My mind was bewilderingly full of Anne, but I could not think of her.  When I fell into the pose of gazing up at her window, the association suggested not the memory I desired, but the picture of Frank Jervaise fumbling in the darkness of the porch, and the excruciating anguish of Racquet’s bark.  From that I fell to wondering why I had not seen Racquet on this occasion of my second visit?  I had not remembered him until then.

I pulled myself up with an effort, and finding the surroundings of the yard so ineffectual as a stimulus, I wandered down the hill towards the wood.  I suggested to myself that I might meet Banks returning from the Hall, but my chief hope was that I might revive the romance of the night.

The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud the night before.  I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather.  I had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end.  The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be uncommonly dull.  I had not seen Brenda before dinner.

I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier excursions through the wood.  The very stillness of the evening, the air of preparation for repose, the first faint suggestions of the passage from summer to autumn, all had some effect of pervading melancholy.  I found myself speculating on the promise of change that my talk with Anne had foreshadowed; of the uprooting of Farmer Banks, of the family’s emigration, and the sadness of their farewells to this exquisitely peaceful country of England.