ing in his feverish
ears. It was like the stir of horses and the creaking of harness, as
though a carriage with an impatient team had been brought up upon the
road before the courtyard gate. At such an hour, upon this rough and
dangerous pass, the supposition was no better than absurd; and Will
dismissed it from his mind, and resumed his seat upon the arbour chair;
and sleep closed over him again like running water. He was once again
awakened by the dead miller's call, thinner and more spectral than
before; and once again he heard the noise of an equipage upon the road.
And so thrice and four times, the same dream, or the same fancy,
presented itself to his senses: until at length, smiling to himself as
when one humours a nervous child, he proceeded towards the gate to set
his uncertainty at rest.

From the arbour to the gate was no great distance, and yet it took Will
some time; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the court,
and crossed his path at every step. For, first, he was suddenly
surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if his
garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot,
damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath. Now the
heliotrope had been Marjory's favourite flower, and since her death not
one of them had ever been planted in Will's ground.

'I must be going crazy,' he thought. 'Poor Marjory and her heliotropes!'

And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once been
hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified; for
there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as of
yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the night
when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity. The illusion
only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned, rubbing his
eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black night behind
it. While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have stood there
quite a long time, there came a renewal of the noises on the road: and he
turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing to meet him across
the court. There was something like the outline of a great carriage
discernible on the road behind the stranger, and, above that, a few black
pine-tops, like so many plumes.

'Master Will?' asked the new-comer, in brief military fashion.

'That same, sir,' answered Will. 'Can I do anything to serve you?