The carriage stopped, and they both, or perhaps it was only Berwick, came down again to the everyday world where friendship between a man and a woman is regarded as so dangerous a thing by the prudent. "Good-night! Thank you for bringing me." He added a word or two as to the carriage and the Priory stables--his coachman was a Chancton man--and then he was gone, leaving Barbara to go on alone, happy, content with life, as she had never thought it possible to be. * * * * * James Berwick, making his way quickly up the steep path leading from the wall built round Chillingworth Park to the high plateau on which stood the house, felt less content and very much less happy. Had he not been rather too quixotic in this matter of leaving Barbara to go on her way alone? Why should he not have prolonged those exquisite moments? What harm could it have done had he given himself the pleasure of accompanying his friend to the Priory, and then driving back to Chillingworth by himself? Perhaps there had been something pusillanimous in his fear of idle gossip. Oh! why had he behaved in this matter so much better than there was any occasion to do? So our good deeds rise up and smite us, and seldom are we allowed the consolation of knowing what alternative action on our part might have brought about. Thus it was an ill-satisfied and restless man who let himself in by a small side-door into the huge silent house. He had given orders that no one should sit up, and in such a matter disobedience on the part of a servant would have meant dismissal. Yet Berwick was an indulgent master, and when he walked into the comparatively small room which he always used when at Chillingworth, the only apartment in the house which in any way betrayed its owner's tastes and idiosyncrasies, he became aware that his comfort, or what it had been thought would be his comfort, had been studied; for a tray, laden with food and various decanters of wines and spirits, stood on a table, and the remains of what had been a large fire still burned in the grate. He stifled an exclamation of disgust. How hot, how airless the room was! He walked over to the high window, pulled back the curtains and threw it open. It was still intensely dark, but along the horizon, above the place where he knew the sea to be, was a shaft of dim light--perhaps the first faint precursor of the dawn. Leaving the window open he came back to the fireplace and flung himself down in a chair, and there came over him a feeling of great depression and of peculiar loneliness.