“To-night?” he exclaimed.  “But, my dear girl, that is impossible.  There are no trains, and you are tired out already.  Go into the house with my niece, and we will have a talk afterwards.”

He walked across the lawn with them, talking pleasantly to Hester, as though her visit were in no sense of the word unpleasant, or an extraordinary event.  But when he returned to his seat under the cedar tree his whole expression was changed.  The lines about his face had insensibly deepened.  He leaned a little forward, looking with weary, unseeing eyes into the tangled shrubbery.  Had all men, he wondered, this secret chapter in their lives—­the one sore place so impossible to forget, the cupboard of shadows never wholly closed, shadows which at any moment might steal out and encompass his darkening life?  He sat there motionless, and his thoughts travelled backwards.  There were many things in his life which he had forgotten, but never this.  Every word that had been spoken, every detail in that tragic little scene seemed to glide into his memory with a distinctness and amplitude which time had never for one second dimmed.  So it must be until the end.  He forgot the girl and her errand.  He forgot the carefully cultivated philosophy which for so many years had helped him towards forgetfulness.  So he sat until the sound of their voices upon the lawn recalled him to the present.

“I will leave you to have your talk with uncle,” Clara said.  “Afterwards I will come back to you.  There he is, sitting under the cedar tree.”

The girl came swiftly over to his side.  For a moment the compassion which he had always felt for her swept away the memory of his own sorrow.  Her pallid, colourless face had lost everything except expression.  If the weariness, which seemed to have found a home in her eyes, was just now absent, it was because a worse thing was shining out of them—­a fear, of which there were traces even in her hurried walk and tone.  He rose at once and held out his hands.

“Come and sit down, Hester,” he said, “and don’t look so frightened.”

She obeyed him at once.

“I am frightened,” she said, “because I feel that I ought not to have come here, and yet I thought that you ought to know at once what has happened.  Sir Leslie Borrowdean has been coming to see mother.  Last night he took her out to dinner.  She came home—­late—­she was not quite herself.  This morning she was frightened and hysterical.  She said—­that she had been talking.”

“To Sir Leslie Borrowdean?”

“Yes.”

Mannering showed no signs of dismay.  He took the girl’s thin white hand in his, and held it almost affectionately.

“I am very glad to know this at once, dear,” he said, “and you did what was right and kind when you came to see me.  But Sir Leslie Borrowdean has no reason to make himself my enemy.  On the contrary, just now he seems particularly anxious to cultivate my friendship.”