“Worry?  Lord, no!  Shout as much as you like.  It reminds me of when I was a kid, coming back from Harrow to Apsley for the holidays.”

When they came in sight of the Manor, could perceive through rents in the cloak of cedars that enveloped it, the high, graceful Elizabethan chimneys and the points of the red gables on which the starlings congregated, Traill half rose to his feet with a straining of his neck—­a light of excitement in his eyes.

“There it is!” he exclaimed.  “That place through the dark trees there.  Jove, I haven’t seen it for more than three years.”

She followed the direction in which his extended finger pointed, and her eyes took in, not only Apsley, but his life and the true gulf that lay between them.  As she saw it from there, she recognized it as a place which, passing, even in those better days when her father had lived in the quaint little rectory at Cailsham, she might have exclaimed—­“Oh, what a lovely place that is!  I wonder who lives there?” And it had belonged to him—­this man who had taken her life out of its dreary groove and placed it in a pleasure-garden of plenty; but the garden gate was not locked and the key was not in her keeping.

This mood was momentary.  It passed, scudding across her mind, a fringe of rain cloud that the wind has caught hanging between the hill-tops and driven at its will.  When Traill leant out of the car and gave peremptory orders of direction, she forgot about it.  Then, in his almost boyish excitement, she realized how much the place really was to him; how much, notwithstanding all his Bohemianism, it counted in his life.

“You love this place—­don’t you?” she said, when he dropped back again into his seat.

“Yes—­I should think so.  I know every stick and stone for miles round here.  See that little lane up there?”

“Yes.”

“Had a fight there once with a gamekeeper.  Much more exciting, I can tell you, than that show you saw that night.”

“Were you hurt?” she asked, frowning.

“Oh, not much; not more than he was.  It was stopped precipitously by a stick, wielded by my governor.  He’d got wind of it.  We hadn’t much time to make a mess of each other.”

“I suppose it must be full of memories,” she said.  “I can never understand why you should have given it up.”

“Oh, I was a fool, of course.  I wanted ready money, and I didn’t want to sell the place—­couldn’t have sold it.  So I let my sister take it over for what the pater had left her.  That suited me at the time.  I’m not sorry that I saw far enough to re-purchase if I wanted to.”

“You can re-purchase?”

“Lord, yes!”

“But you did not tell me that.”

“Didn’t I?  Oh yes, I can re-purchase; five thousand any day will make this place my own again.  That’s the sum I took from my sister.”

Sally inclined her head to show that she understood, but she made no reply.  The cloud had blown back again into her mind.  She felt the shadow of it, the chill of it, even in the warm sunshine.  It took no definite shape, it brought no definite warning; but she was oppressively conscious of its presence and its weight upon all her thoughts.