‘To your husband?’

‘To his name, to his honour.’

‘To the vow to live with him?’

‘My husband broke that for me.’

’Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it?  God knows what you may save me from!’

’Pray to God.  Do not beg of me, my lord.  I have my brother and my little son.  No more of husband for me!  God has given me a friend, too,—­a man of humble heart, my brother’s friend, my dear Rebecca’s husband.  He can take them from me:  no one but God.  See the splendid sky we have.’

With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of anguish swell an ecstasy.  So he felt it, for his mood was now the lover’s.  A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.

‘I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,’ he said.  ‘The name of his house?’

‘My brother is not now any more in the English army,’ she replied.  ’He has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.’

‘He will receive me, I presume?’

‘My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.’

‘Here is the church, and here we have to part for today.  Do we?’

‘Good-bye to you, my lord,’ she said.

He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.

‘Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?’

‘For the present,’ was her strange answer.

She bowed, she stepped on.  On she sped, leaving him at the stammered beginning of his appeal to her.

Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was what the world would class as curious.  To him it was a further and a well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him.  He sauntered by the graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight.  It went like a puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen.  Her vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.

There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family had given him at his request.  He felt the lump.  It had an answer for all perplexities.  It had been charged and emptied since it was in his possession; and it could be charged again.  The thing was a volume as big as the world to study.  For the touch of a finger, one could have its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.