to him.
"Look at the length of the shadows. I must go. Thank you, Lord Mount
Dunstan, for showing me the place, and thank you for undeceiving me."

He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as she passed
through. He admitted to himself, with some reluctance, that he was not
content that she should go even yet, but, of course, she must go. There
passed through his mind a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed
himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself. It was,
he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one place to
another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in
them so long--the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the
lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness
wrecked. She had shown it in the way in which she tenderly looked from
side to side, in the very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell
softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she had understood and cared, American
as she was! She had felt it all, even with her hideous background of
Fifth Avenue behind her.

When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to an emotion in
herself.

So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her walking up the
sunset-glowing road.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT

Betty Vanderpoel's walk back to Stornham did not, long though it was,
give her time to follow to its end the thread of her thoughts. Mentally
she walked again with her uncommunicative guide, through woodpaths and
gardens, and stood gazing at the great blind-faced house. She had not
given the man more than an occasional glance until he had told her his
name. She had been too much absorbed, too much moved, by what she had
been seeing. She wondered, if she had been more aware of him, whether
his face would have revealed a great deal. She believed it would not. He
had made himself outwardly stolid. But the thing must have been bitter.
To him the whole story of the splendid past was familiar even if through
his own life he had looked on only at gradual decay. There must be
stories enough of men and women who had lived in the place, of what they
had done, of how they had loved, of what they had counted for in their
country's wars and peacemakings, great functions and law-building. To
be able to look back through centuries and know of one's blood that
sometimes it had been shed in the doing of great deeds, must be a thing
to remember. To realise that