“Two very good things in their way, sir, but easily overdone,” was the mild rejoinder.  “These hills are terrible unless you’re at them all the time.”

Tallente drank his whisky and soda almost greedily and felt the benefit of it, although he was still weary.  He had walked for five miles in the company of ghosts and their faces had been grey.  Perhaps, too, it was the passing of his youth which brought this tiredness to his limbs.

“Robert,” he confessed abruptly, “I was a fool to come down here at all.”

“It’s dreary at this time of the year unless you’ve time to shoot or hunt, sir.  Why not motor to Bath to-morrow?  I could wire for rooms, and I could drive you up to London the next day.  Motoring’s a good way of getting the air, sir, and you won’t overtire yourself.”

“I’ll think of it in the morning,” his master promised.

“My wife has found the silver, sir,” Robert announced, as he turned to leave the room, “and I managed to get a little fish.  That, with some soup, a pheasant, and a fruit tart, we thought—­”

“I shall be alone, Robert,” Tallente interrupted.  “There is no one coming for dinner.”

The man’s disappointment was barely concealed.  He sighed as he took up the tray.

“Very good, sir.  Your clothes are all out.  I’ll turn on the hot water in the bathroom.”

Tallente threw off his rain and mud-soaked clothes, bathed, changed and descended to the dining room just as the gong sounded.  Robert was in the act of moving the additional place from the little round dining table which he had drawn up closer to the wood fire, but his master stopped him.

“You can let those things be,” he directed.  “Take away the champagne, though.  I shan’t want that.”

Robert bowed in silent appreciation of his master’s humour and began ladling out soup at the sideboard.  Tallente’s lips were curled a little, partly in self-contempt, with perhaps just a dash of self-pity.  It had come to this, then, that he must dine with fancies rather than alone, that this tardily developed streak of sentimentality must be ministered to or would drag him into the depths of dejection.  He began to understand the psychology of its late appearance.  Stella’s artificial companionship had kept his thoughts imprisoned, fettered with the meshes of an instinctive fidelity, and had driven him sedulously to the solace of work and books.  Now that it was removed and he was to all practical purposes a free man, they took their own course.  His life had suddenly become a natural one, and all that was human in him responded to the possibilities of his solitude, He had had as yet no time to experience the relief, to appreciate his liberty, before he was face to face with this new loneliness.  To-night, he thought, as he looked at the empty place and remembered his wistful, almost diffident invitation, the solitude was almost unendurable.  If she had only understood