“Very well.”

“Then I will wish you good evening, sir.  Thank you, sir.  I am glad to ’ave been of assistance.”

He withdrew as he had come, with a large impressiveness.  The room seemed very empty without him.  George, with trembling fingers, began to put on a pair of thick boots.

For some minutes after he had set foot outside the door of the cottage, George was inclined to revile the weather for having played him false.  On this evening of all evenings, he felt, the elements should, so to speak, have rallied round and done their bit.  The air should have been soft and clear and scented:  there should have been an afterglow of sunset in the sky to light him on his way.  Instead, the air was full of that peculiar smell of hopeless dampness which comes at the end of a wet English day.  The sky was leaden.  The rain hissed down in a steady flow, whispering of mud and desolation, making a dreary morass of the lane through which he tramped.  A curious sense of foreboding came upon George.  It was as if some voice of the night had murmured maliciously in his ear a hint of troubles to come.  He felt oddly nervous, as he entered the barn.

The barn was both dark and dismal.  In one of the dark corners an intermittent dripping betrayed the presence of a gap in its ancient roof.  A rat scurried across the floor.  The dripping stopped and began again.  George struck a match and looked at his watch.  He was early.  Another ten minutes must elapse before he could hope for her arrival.  He sat down on a broken wagon which lay on its side against one of the walls.

Depression returned.  It was impossible to fight against it in this beast of a barn.  The place was like a sepulchre.  No one but a fool of a butler would have suggested it as a trysting-place.  He wondered irritably why places like this were allowed to get into this condition.  If people wanted a barn earnestly enough to take the trouble of building one, why was it not worth while to keep the thing in proper repair?  Waste and futility!  That was what it was.  That was what everything was, if you came down to it.  Sitting here, for instance, was a futile waste of time.  She wouldn’t come.  There were a dozen reasons why she should not come.  So what was the use of his courting rheumatism by waiting in this morgue of dead agricultural ambitions?  None whatever—­George went on waiting.

And what an awful place to expect her to come to, if by some miracle she did come—­where she would be stifled by the smell of mouldy hay, damped by raindrops and—­reflected George gloomily as there was another scurry and scutter along the unseen floor—­gnawed by rats.  You could not expect a delicately-nurtured girl, accustomed to all the comforts of a home, to be bright and sunny with a platoon of rats crawling all over her. . . .

The grey oblong that was the doorway suddenly darkened.

“Mr. Bevan!”