f as an able man among able men, to ask of
ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain,
the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance
Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.

He turned to look at the clock.

She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the
only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of
escape during a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who was
of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say
unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother's son.

It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently.
The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb and
troubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and began to
walk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the mere sake
of movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale of them
had not yet been formally sanctioned by the court; but all Lady Laura's
private and personal possessions had been removed to London, and
dust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been already
sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dusty
litter of paper and straw. All the signs of normal life, which make the
character of a house, had gone; what remained was only the debris of a
once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and in
the ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole of the great
many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations beneath the
central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt had disfigured the
garden front, had often, since his father's death, seemed to speak with
an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.

But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Why
had she written to him?

Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written to
him--letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had been
nothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hear
her very voice saying the soft, touching things in it--things that women
say so easily and men can't hit upon; and to be looking into her
changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again so
childishly sweet and sad--as he had seen them, at their last meeting on
the moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet ther