We all three remained silent for some little time, Milly and I standing together in the window, Mr. Egerton leaning against the mantelpiece, watching the rain with an absent look in his face.  He roused himself at last, as if with an effort, and came over to the window by which we stood.

‘It looks rather hopeless at present,’ he said; ’but I shall spin you over to Thornleigh in no time; so you mustn’t be anxious.  It is at Thornleigh Manor you live, is it not?’

‘Yes,’ Milly answered.  ’My name is Darrell, and this young lady is Miss Crofton, my very dear friend.’

He bowed in recognition of this introduction.

’I thought as much—­I mean as to your name being Darrell.  I had the honour to know Mr. Darrell very well when I was a lad, and I have a vague recollection of a small child in white frock, who, I think, must have been yourself.  I have only been home a week, or I should have done myself the pleasure of calling on your father.’

‘Papa is in Paris,’ Milly answered, ‘with my stepmother.’

’Ah, he has married again, I hear.  One of the many changes that have come to pass since I was last in Yorkshire.’

‘Have you returned for good, Mr. Egerton?’

‘For good—­or for evil—­who knows?’ he answered, with a careless laugh.  ’As to whether I stay here so many weeks or so many years, that is a matter of supreme uncertainty.  I never am in the same mind very long together.  But I am heartily sick of knocking about abroad, and I cannot possibly find life emptier or duller here than I have found it in places that people call gay.’

‘I can’t fancy any one growing tired of such a place as the Priory,’ said Milly.

’ “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” " ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.”  Cannot you fancy a man getting utterly tired of himself and his own thoughts—­knowing himself by heart, and finding the lesson a dreary one?  Perhaps not.  A girl’s life seems all brightness.  What should such happy young creatures know of that arid waste of years that lies beyond a man’s thirtieth birthday, when his youth has not been a fortunate one?  Ah, there is a break in the sky yonder; the rain will be over presently.’

The rain did cease, as he had prophesied.  The dog-cart was brought round to the door by a clumsy-looking man in corduroy, who seemed half groom, half gardener; and Mr. Egerton drove us home; Milly sitting next him, I at the back.  His horse was very good one, and the drive only lasted a quarter of an hour, during which time our new acquaintance talked very pleasantly to both of us.

I could not forget that Mr. Darrell had called him a bad man; but in spite of that sweeping condemnation I could not bring myself to think of him without a certain interest.

Of course Milly and I discussed Mr. Egerton as we sat over our snug little tete-a-tete dinner, and we were both inclined to speak of his blighted life in a pitying kind of way, and to blame his mother’s conduct, little as we knew of the details of the story.  Our existences were so quiet that this little incident made quite an event, and we were apt to date things from that afternoon for some time afterwards.