The vision lasted only a moment. Ellesborough's trained instinct, the wary instinct of the man who had parsed days and nights with nature in her wilder and lonelier places, checked the exclamation on his lips. And before he could move again, the face had disappeared. The old holly bush growing against the farm wall, from which the apparition seemed to have sprung, was still there, some of its glossy leaves visible in the bright light of the paraffin lamp which stood on the table near the window. And there was nothing else. Ellesborough quietly walked to the window, drew down the blind, and pulled the curtains together. Rachel looked around at the sound. "Didn't I do that?" she said, half dreamily. "We forgot!" He smiled at her. "Now it's all cosy. Ah, there they are! Perhaps I'll get Janet to come as far as the road with me." For voices were approaching--Janet talking to the girls. Rachel looked up, assenting. The colour had rushed back to her face. Ellesborough took in the picture of her, sitting unconscious by the fire, while his own pulse was thumping under the excitement of what he had seen. With a last word to her, he closed the sitting-room door behind him, and went out to meet Janet Leighton in the dark. IX It was a foggy October evening, and Berkeley Square, from which the daylight had not yet departed, made a peculiarly dismal impression on the passers-by, under the mingled illumination of its half-blinded lamps, and of a sunset which in the country was clear and golden, and here in west London could only give a lurid coppery tinge to the fog, to the eastern house-fronts, and to the great plane-trees holding the Square garden, like giants encamped. Landsowne House, in its lordly seclusion from the rest of the Square, seemed specially to have gathered the fog to itself, and was almost lost from sight. Not a ray of light escaped the closely-shuttered windows. The events of the _mensis mirabilis_ were rushing on. Bulgaria, Austria, Turkey, had laid down their arms--the German cry for an armistice had rung through Europe. But still London lay dark and muffled. Her peril was not yet over.