ys older, you can bet your life on that. Old
great-grandmother four-poster takes her _conge_ to-morrow morning. If
I must live here I'll sleep anyhow."

He settled himself back against the hard, horsehair sofa, and pulled up
the blind. The room was instantly filled with gray and lavender shadows,
while without the Fens stretched out in unbroken lines as though all the
rest of the world were made up of nothing else. Lonely? Merriton had
known the loneliness of Indian nights, far away from any signs of
civilization: the loneliness of the jungle when the air was so still that
the least sound was like the dropping of a bomb; the strange mystical
loneliness which comes to the only white man in a town of natives. But
all these were as nothing as compared to this. He could imagine a chap
committing suicide living in such a house. Sir Joseph Merriton had
disappeared five years before--and no wonder!

Merriton lay with his eyes upon the window, smoking a cigarette, and
surveyed the outlook before him with despairing eyes. What a future for
a chap in his early thirties to face! Not a sign of habitation anywhere,
not a vestige of it, save at the far edge of the Fens where a clump of
trees and thick shrubs told him that behind lay Withersby Hall. This,
intuition told him, was the home of Antoinette Brellier, the girl of the
train, of the wreck, and now of his dreams. Then his thoughts turned to
her. Gad! to bring a frail, delicate little butterfly to a place like
this was like trying to imprison a ray of sunshine in a leaden box!...

His eyes, rivetted upon where the clump of trees stood out against the
semi-darkness of the approaching dawn, saw of a sudden a light prick out
like a tiny flame, low down upon the very edge of the Fens. One light,
two, three, and then a very host of them flashed out, as though some
unseen hand had torn the heavens down and strewn their jewels broadcast
over the marshes. Instinctively he got to his feet. What on earth--? But
even as his lips formed the unspoken exclamation came yet another light
to join the others dancing and twinkling and flickering out there across
the gloomy marshlands.

What the dickens was it, anyhow? A sort of unearthly fireworks display,
or some new explosive experiment? The dancing flames got into his eyes
like bits of lighted thistledown blown here, there, and everywhere.

Merriton got to his feet and threw open another window bottom with a good
deal of effort, for the sas