“Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am,” he had said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor.  “If a man was dragged out when he had not lived a day, he would come back I should come back if—­God!  A man could not be dragged away—­like this!”

And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing—­a lonely thing.

But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified itself.  This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were within reach—­and without it.  When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and talked.  Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when he was not out of doors.  Since he could not afford servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed.  It was a ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments.  He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay.  To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.

“Whom am I doing it for?” he said to Mr. Penzance.  “I am doing it for myself—­because I cannot help it.  The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of his days It has stood the war of things for century after century—­the war of things.  It is going now I am all that is left to it.  It is all I have.  So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage.”

Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon.  It was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually consider them.  So Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.

“Nigel will be caught in the rain,” she said to her sister.  “I wonder why he goes out now.  It would be better to wait until to-morrow.”

But Sir Nigel did not think so.  He had calculated matters with some nicety.  He was not exactly on such terms with Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual call and in an unpremeditated manner.  He meant to reach the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.