“Very good of you to send me back,” the doctor said gruffly.  “I started out all right, but it was a drear walk across the marshes.”

“I am very grateful to you for coming,” Dominey replied, with obvious sincerity.  “You will come and have a look at the patient in a day or two?”

“I’ll stroll across as soon as you’ve got rid of some of this houseful,” the doctor promised.  “Good night!”

The two men parted, and curiously enough Dominey was conscious that with those few awkward words of farewell some part of the incipient antagonism between them had been buried.  Left to himself, he wandered for some moments up and down the great, dimly lit hall.  A strange restlessness seemed to have fastened itself upon him.  He stood for a time by the dying fire, watching the grey ashes, stirred uneasily by the wind which howled down the chimney.  Then he strolled to a different part of the hall, and one by one he turned on, by means of the electric switches, the newly installed lights which hung above the sombre oil pictures upon the wall.  He looked into the faces of some of these dead Domineys, trying to recall what he had heard of their history, and dwelling longest upon a gallant of the Stuart epoch, whose misdeeds had supplied material for every intimate chronicler of those days.  When at last the sight of a sleepy manservant hovering in the background forced his steps upstairs, he still lingered for a few moments in the corridor and turned the handle of his bedroom door with almost reluctant fingers.  His heart gave a great jump as he realised that there was some one there.  He stood for a moment upon the threshold, then laughed shortly to himself at his foolish imagining.  It was his servant who was patiently awaiting his arrival.

“You can go to bed, Dickens,” he directed.  “I shall not want you again to-night.  We shoot in the morning.”

The man silently took his leave, and Dominey commenced his preparations for bed.  He was in no humour for sleep, however, and, still attired in his shirt and trousers, he wrapped a dressing-gown around him, drew a reading lamp to his side, and threw himself into an easy-chair, a book in his hand.  It was some time before he realised that the volume was upside down, and even when he had righted it, the words he saw had no meaning for him.  All the time a queer procession of women’s faces was passing before his eyes—­Caroline, with her half-flirtatious, wholly sentimental bon camaraderie; Stephanie, with her voluptuous figure and passion-lit eyes; and then, blotting the others utterly out of his thoughts and memory, Rosamund, with all the sweetness of life shining out of her eager face.  He saw her as she had come to him last, with that little unspoken cry upon her tremulous lips, and the haunting appeal in her soft eyes.  All other memories faded away.  They were as though they had never been.  Those dreary years of exile in Africa, the day by day tension