and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes distinctly.  A man’s face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman’s.  The match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and all he could see vanished from sight with its light.  His only thought was that whoever had escaped him before should not escape him again, and he broke open the window shutters by main strength.

The light poured in upon a set of empty rooms, faded and dusty.  A glance showed him an open door at the back of the farthest room, and rushing through this, he opened the windows in that part of the house which had evidently been lately inhabited.  He next came into the hall by which he had entered, and out again at the front door, with no doubt that he was chasing some one, but he did not gain in the pursuit.  He went down the path to the road, looking up and down it; he came back, in and out among the bushes, searching the cemetery and river bank, vexed beyond measure all the time to perceive how easy it would be for any one to go one way while he was searching in another, for the garden was large.

He had good reason to feel that he was the victim of most annoying circumstances, and he naturally could not at once perceive how it behoved him to act in relation to this new scene in the almost forgotten drama.  Cameron was dead; the old preacher was dead; whether they were one and the same or not, who was this person who now for the second time suddenly started up in mysterious fashion after the death?  Alec assumed that it could be no one but Cameron’s daughter, but when he tried to think how it might be possible that she should be in the deserted house, upon the track of the old preacher, as it were, his mind failed even to conjecture.

The explanation was comparatively simple, if he had known it, but he did not know it.  Someone has said that the man most assured of his own truthfulness is not usually truthful; and in the same sense it is true that the man most positive in trusting his own senses is not usually reliable.  Alec Trenholme flagged in his search; a most unpleasing doubt came to him as to whether he had seen what he thought he saw and was not now playing hide-and-seek with the rosy evening sunbeams among these bushes, driven by a freak of diseased fancy.  He was indeed provoked to a degree almost beyond control, when, in a last effort of search through the dense shrubbery, he skirted the fence of Captain Rexford’s nearest field, and there espied Sophia Rexford.

Those people are happy who have found some person or thing on earth that embodies their ideal of earthly solace.  To some it is the strains of music; to some it is the interior of church edifices; to the child it is his mother; to the friend it is his friend.  As soon as Alec Trenholme saw this fair woman, whom he yet scarcely knew, all the fret of his spirit found vent in the sudden desire to tell her what was vexing him, very much as a child desires to tell its troubles and be comforted.