dow of a something in his
demeanour that proved him alien.

None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the
imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should
come to the worst, why--there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for
the beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets,
and soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of
shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the
hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with dying
colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows filled
the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him here. He
looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops were
left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he was
descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had
stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had wandered
down into the churchyard.

At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and
there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding from
his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling rose-shoot
on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its old red
chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with windows
vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds that stood
mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then came more
lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that pricks, and
then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied gate of
the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part
described.

It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure.
Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a narrow box-edged path
led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square
window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood
waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience he
heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused on
the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence;
but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding
path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently a
quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into a
little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old