Daphne went softly into the empty house. It was more ghostly than the church—more uncanny in its emptiness. She felt as if the disembodied souls of the dead were verily around and about her. That empty hearth, on which the moonbeams shone so coldly; those dusky walls; a vacant chair or two; a gleam of coloured light from an old scrap of stained glass. How cold it all felt in its dismal loneliness. She tried to conjure up a vision of the poet’s home three hundred years ago—in its old-world simplicity, its homely comfort and repose; a world before steam-engines, gas, and electricity; a world in which printing and gunpowder were almost new. To think of it was like going back to the childhood of this earth. Daphne left the outer door ajar, and crept softly through the rooms, half expectant of ghostly company. What tricks moonbeam and shadow played upon the walls, upon the solid old timber crossbeams, where in the unregenerate days, a quarter of a century ago, pilgrims used to pencil their miserable names upon the wood or whitewash, childishly fancying they were securing to themselves a kind of immortality. Daphne stood by the window with her heart beating feverishly, and her ear strained to catch the footfall of the sisters in the garden, and thus to be sure of human company. She looked along the empty street, moonlighted, peaceful; even the tavern over the way a place of seeming tranquillity, notable only by its glimmering window and red curtain. The silence and shadowiness of the house were beginning to frighten her in spite of her better reason, when a step came behind her—a firm light tread which her ear and heart knew too well. It seemed almost as if her heart stopped beating at the sound of that footfall. She stood like a thing of marble, scarce breathing. The step had crossed the threshold of the outer room, and was drawing nearer, when an eager voice outside broke the spell: ‘Is she there? Have you found her?’ It was Edgar’s voice at the outer door. ‘Yes. Where else should she be?’ answered Gerald Goring. ‘Well, my lady, I hope you are satisfied with the nice little dance you have led us,’ he said to Daphne as coolly as if he had been talking to a refractory child. ‘You need not have troubled yourself about me,’ she answered curtly. ‘I told Lina I was coming for a walk. How did Edgar know I was here?’ ‘Edgar knew nothing,’ answered Gerald, with a light laugh that was something too scornful for perfect friendship. ‘Edgar would as soon have looked for you at Guy’s Cliff or Warwick Castle, or in the moon. I knew you were nothing if not Shakespearian; and when I heard you had taken your boat I guessed you had gone to worship at your favourite shrine. We heard of you at the church, and hunted for you among the trees and tombs.’