“That people could live in such places!” he told himself, over and over again.  “No wonder my poor old uncle disappeared!  Any self-respecting Christian would.  There’ll be some slight alterations made in Merriton Towers before I’m many days older, you can bet your life on that.  Old great-grandmother four-poster takes her conge to-morrow morning.  If I must live here I’ll sleep anyhow.”

He settled himself back against the hard, horsehair sofa, and pulled up the blind.  The room was instantly filled with gray and lavender shadows, while without the Fens stretched out in unbroken lines as though all the rest of the world were made up of nothing else.  Lonely?  Merriton had known the loneliness of Indian nights, far away from any signs of civilization:  the loneliness of the jungle when the air was so still that the least sound was like the dropping of a bomb; the strange mystical loneliness which comes to the only white man in a town of natives.  But all these were as nothing as compared to this.  He could imagine a chap committing suicide living in such a house.  Sir Joseph Merriton had disappeared five years before—­and no wonder!

Merriton lay with his eyes upon the window, smoking a cigarette, and surveyed the outlook before him with despairing eyes.  What a future for a chap in his early thirties to face!  Not a sign of habitation anywhere, not a vestige of it, save at the far edge of the Fens where a clump of trees and thick shrubs told him that behind lay Withersby Hall.  This, intuition told him, was the home of Antoinette Brellier, the girl of the train, of the wreck, and now of his dreams.  Then his thoughts turned to her.  Gad! to bring a frail, delicate little butterfly to a place like this was like trying to imprison a ray of sunshine in a leaden box!...

His eyes, rivetted upon where the clump of trees stood out against the semi-darkness of the approaching dawn, saw of a sudden a light prick out like a tiny flame, low down upon the very edge of the Fens.  One light, two, three, and then a very host of them flashed out, as though some unseen hand had torn the heavens down and strewn their jewels broadcast over the marshes.  Instinctively he got to his feet.  What on earth—?  But even as his lips formed the unspoken exclamation came yet another light to join the others dancing and twinkling and flickering out there across the gloomy marshlands.

What the dickens was it, anyhow?  A sort of unearthly fireworks display, or some new explosive experiment?  The dancing flames got into his eyes like bits of lighted thistledown blown here, there, and everywhere.

Merriton got to his feet and threw open another window bottom with a good deal of effort, for the sashes were old and stiff.  Then, clad only in his silk pyjamas, and with the cigarette charring itself to a tiny column of gray ash in one hand, he leaned far out over the sill and watched those twinkling, dancing, maddening little star-flames, with the eyes of amazed astonishment.