ere were few things he liked better than a
chat with the young fellow whom he had taught to hold a gun; and Tatham
was generally the most accessible of masters and the keenest of
sportsmen, going into every detail of the shooting parties himself, with
an unfailing spirit.

Meanwhile Victoria was speeding eastward in her motor along the Pengarth
road. Darkness was fast rushing on. To her left she saw the spreading
waste of Flitterdale Common, its great stretches of moss livid in the
dusk: and beyond it, westward, the rounded tops and slopes of the range
that runs from Great Dodd to Helvellyn. Presently she made out, in the
distance, looking southward from the high-level road on which the car was
running, the great enclosure of Threlfall Park, on either side of the
river which ran between her and Flitterdale; the dim line of its circling
wall; its scattered woods; and farther on, the square mass of the Tower
itself, black above the trees.

The car stopped at a gate, a dark and empty lodge beside it. The footman
jumped down. Was the gate locked?--and must she go round to Whitebeck,
and make her attack from that side? No, the gate swung open, and in sped
the car.

Victoria sat upright, her mood strung to an intensity which knew no
fears. It was twenty years since she had last seen Edmund Melrose, and it
was thirty years and more since she had rescued her sister from his
grasp, and the duel between herself and him had ended in her final
victory.

How dim they seemed, those far-off days!--when for some two or three
years, either in London or in Paris, where her father was Ambassador, she
had been in frequent contact with a group of young men--of young
"bloods"--conspicuous in family and wealth, among whom Edmund Melrose was
the reckless leader of a dare-devil set. She thought of a famous picture
of the young Beckford, by Lawrence, to which Melrose on the younger
side of forty had been frequently compared. The same romantic beauty of
feature, the same liquid depth of eye, the same splendid carriage; and,
combined with these, the same insolence and selfishness. There had been
in Victoria's earlier youth moments when to see him enter a ballroom was
to feel her head swim with excitement; when to carry him off from a rival
was a passionate delight; when she coveted his praise, and dreaded his
sarcasm. And yet--it was perfectly true what she had said to Harry. She
had never been in love with him. The imagination of an "unlesson