red the library, and amid objects swathed in brown holland sat down
and wrote a note to his niece at Amiens. Therein he stated that, finding
that the Anglo-South-American house with which he had recently connected
himself required his presence in Peru, it obliged him to leave without
waiting for her return. He felt the less uneasy at going, since he had
learnt that Captain De Stancy would return at once to Amiens to his sick
sister, and see them safely home when she improved. He afterwards left
the castle, disappearing towards a railway station some miles above
Markton, the road to which lay across an unfrequented down.

XII.

It was a fine afternoon of late summer, nearly three months subsequent
to the death of Sir William De Stancy and Paula's engagement to
marry his successor in the title. George Somerset had started on a
professional journey that took him through the charming district which
lay around Stancy Castle. Having resigned his appointment as architect
to that important structure--a resignation which had been accepted by
Paula through her solicitor--he had bidden farewell to the locality
after putting matters in such order that his successor, whoever he might
be, should have no difficulty in obtaining the particulars necessary
to the completion of the work in hand. Hardly to his surprise this
successor was Havill.

Somerset's resignation had been tendered in no hasty mood. On returning
to England, and in due course to the castle, everything bore in upon
his mind the exceeding sorrowfulness--he would not say humiliation--of
continuing to act in his former capacity for a woman who, from seeming
more than a dear friend, had become less than an acquaintance.

So he resigned; but now, as the train drew on into that once beloved
tract of country, the images which met his eye threw him back in point
of emotion to very near where he had been before making himself a
stranger here. The train entered the cutting on whose brink he had
walked when the carriage containing Paula and her friends surprised him
the previous summer. He looked out of the window: they were passing the
well-known curve that led up to the tunnel constructed by her father,
into which he had gone when the train came by and Paula had been alarmed
for his life. There was the path they had both climbed afterwards,
involuntarily seizing each other's hand; the bushes, the grass, the
flowers, everything just the same:

'-----Here was