He slipped her arm through his to make her come.  She stumbled along, turning her face aside towards those mystic woods.  At the end of those paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all sides by the forest; and there was something there....  Another temple?  A statue?  An event?  She did not know.  But if they found it, they would be happy for ever....

“Richard—­”

“No.”

He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the ploughed field.  When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard gate, the bobbing lantern.

“She’s going fairly quickly,” he said softly, speculatively.  “I wonder if she’s been to his tomb?  Do you think she’s had time?”

“I don’t know,” Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when he must be aware she could not tell.

“Oh, well!” he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth at their feet.  “We’ll find out when we get home.  Let’s hurry back.”

They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance.  The humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet.  The speed they went at shook the breath out of her lungs.  At an easy, comfortable pace, the lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden.  She was the lucky woman, Marion.

“Good,” said Richard, as they passed through the gate.  “You did that in fine style.”

“Why do you need to hurry so?” she protested.  “You have all night now to ask her where she has been.”

“I want to find out if she has been to his tomb,” he repeated with dull, drilling persistence.

When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply.  “Why is she standing by the servant’s door?  Why the devil is she always doing such extraordinary things?”

Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady rays of the lantern come to rest.  “You’d better go and ask her,” she said pettishly.

He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him.  At that moment there came the sound of knocking near by.  He caught his breath, pressed on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in the side of the house, calling querulously:  “Mother!  Mother!”

The light swung and wavered.  “What is the woman up to?” thought Ellen crossly.  The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight beams were still unclouded.