In less than half an hour Harvey was back at the station, waiting for his train.  He suffered pangs of self-rebuke; it seemed to him that he ought to have found some better way, in word or deed, for manifesting the sympathy of true friendship.  He had betrayed a doubt which must for ever affect Hugh’s feeling towards him.  But this was his lot in life, to blunder amid trying circumstances, to prove unequal to every grave call upon him.  He tried vainly to see what else he could have done, yet felt that another man would have faced the situation to better purpose.  One resolve, at all events, he had brought out of it:  Hugh Carnaby’s reference to Alma declared the common-sense view of a difficulty which ought to be no difficulty at all, and put an end to vacillation.  But in return for this friendly service he had rendered nothing, save a few half-hearted words of encouragement.  Rolfe saw himself in a mean, dispiriting light.

On the next day Mrs. Frothingham arrived at Pinner, and Harvey’s anxieties were lightened.  The good, capable woman never showed to such advantage as in a sick-room; scarcely had she entered the house when Alma’s state began to improve.  They remarked that Alma showed no great concern on Sibyl’s account, but was seemingly preoccupied with thought of Carnaby himself.  This being the case, it was with solicitude that Harvey and Mrs. Frothingham awaited the result of Hugh’s trial for manslaughter.  Redgrave’s housekeeper could not be found; the self-accused man stood or fell by his own testimony; nothing was submitted to the court beyond the fact of Redgrave’s death, and Hugh Carnaby’s explanation of how it came about.  Nothing of direct evidence; indirect, in the shape of witness to character, was abundantly forthcoming, and from ’people of importance.  But the victim also was a person of importance, and justice no doubt felt that, under whatever provocation, such a man must not be slain with impunity.  It sentenced the homicide to a term of two years’ imprisonment, without hard labour.

Alma heard the sentence with little emotion.  Soon after she fell into a deeper and more refreshing sleep than any she had known since her illness began.

‘It is the end of suspense,’ said Mrs. Frothingham.

‘No doubt,’ Harvey assented.

A few days more and Mrs. Frothingham took Alma away into Hampshire.  Little Hugh went with them, his mother strongly desiring it.  As for Rolfe, he escaped to Greystone, to spend a week with Basil Morton before facing the miseries of the removal from Pinner to Gunnersbury.

Part the Third

CHAPTER 1

The house had stood for a century and a half, and for eighty years had been inhabited by Mortons.  Of its neighbours in the elm-bordered road, one or two were yet older; all had reached the age of mellowness.  ’Sicut umbra praeterit dies’ —­ so ran the motto of the dial set between porch and eaves; to Harvey Rolfe the kindliest of all greetings, welcoming him to such tranquillity as he knew not how to find elsewhere.