Had I been older or he less formidable, I might have said what was in my heart, and begged him to give up other things also—­to come out from those shallow circles in which he lived, and to find some work that was worthy of his strong brain and his good heart.  But the thought had hardly formed itself in my mind before he had dropped his serious vein, and was chatting away about some new silver-mounted harness which he intended to spring upon the Mall, and about the match for a thousand guineas which he meant to make between his filly Ethelberta and Lord Doncaster’s famous three-year-old Aurelius.

We had got as far as Whiteman’s Green, which is rather more than midway between Crawley Down and Friars’ Oak, when, looking backwards, I saw far down the road the gleam of the sun upon a high yellow carriage.  Sir Lothian Hume was following us.

“He has had the same summons as we, and is bound for the same destination,” said my uncle, glancing over his shoulder at the distant barouche.  “We are both wanted at Cliffe Royal—­we, the two survivors of that black business.  And it is Jim Harrison of all people who calls us there.  Nephew, I have had an eventful life, but I feel as if the very strangest scene of it were waiting for me among those trees.”

He whipped up the mares, and now from the curve of the road we could see the high dark pinnacles of the old Manor-house shooting up above the ancient oaks which ring it round.  The sight of it, with its bloodstained and ghost-blasted reputation, would in itself have been enough to send a thrill through my nerves; but when the words of my uncle made me suddenly realize that this strange summons was indeed for the two men who were concerned in that old-world tragedy, and that it was the playmate of my youth who had sent it, I caught my breath as I seemed vaguely to catch a glimpse of some portentous thing forming itself in front of us.  The rusted gates between the crumbling heraldic pillars were folded back, and my uncle flicked the mares impatiently as we flew up the weed-grown avenue, until he pulled them on their haunches before the time-blotched steps.  The front door was open, and Boy Jim was waiting there to meet us.

But it was a different Boy Jim from him whom I had known and loved.  There was a change in him somewhere, a change so marked that it was the first thing that I noticed, and yet so subtle that I could not put words to it.  He was not better dressed than of old, for I well knew the old brown suit that he wore.

He was not less comely, for his training had left him the very model of what a man should be.  And yet there was a change, a touch of dignity in the expression, a suggestion of confidence in the bearing which seemed, now that it was supplied, to be the one thing which had been needed to give him harmony and finish.

Somehow, in spite of his prowess, his old school name of “Boy” had clung very naturally to him, until that instant when I saw him standing in his self-contained and magnificent manhood in the doorway of the ancient house.  A woman stood beside him, her hand resting upon his shoulder, and I saw that it was Miss Hinton of Anstey Cross.