The day after Paul’s departure for London with his lawyer and his uncle, Mr. Gus left the Markham Arms. By a fatality Fairfax thought, he too was going away at the same time. He had gone up to Markham in the morning early for no particular reason. He said to himself that he wanted to see the house of which he had so strangely become an inmate for a little while and then had been swept out of, most probably for ever. To think that he knew all those rooms as familiarly as if they belonged to him, and could wander about them in his imagination, and remember whereabouts the pictures hung on the walls, and how the patterns went in the carpet, and yet never had seen them a month ago, and never might see them again! It is a strange experience in a life when this happens, but not a very rare one. Sometimes the passer-by is made for a single evening, for an hour or two, the sharer of an existence which drops entirely into the darkness afterwards, and is never visible to him again. Fairfax asked himself somewhat sadly if this was how it was to be. He thought that he would never in his life forget one detail of those rooms, the very way the curtains hung, the covers on the tables: and yet they could never be anything to him except a picture in his memory, hanging suspended between the known and the unknown. The great door was open as he had known it (“It is always open,” he said to himself), and all the windows of the sitting-rooms, receiving the full air and sunshine into them. But up stairs the house was not yet open. Over some of the windows the curtains were drawn. Where they still sleeping, the two women who were in his thoughts? He cared much less in comparison for the rest of the family. Paul, indeed, being in trouble, had been much in his mind as he came up the avenue; but Paul had not been here when Fairfax had lived in the house, and did not enter into his recollections; and Paul he knew was away now. But the two ladies--Alice, whom he had been allowed to spend so many lingering hours with, whom he had told so much about himself--and Lady Markham, whom he had never ceased to wonder at; they had taken him into the very closest circle of their friendship; they had said “Go,” and he had gone; or “Come,” and he had always been ready to obey. And now was he to see no more of them for ever? Fairfax could not but feel very melancholy when this thought came into his mind. He came slowly up the avenue, looking at the old house. The old house he called it to himself, as people speak of the home they have loved for years. He would never forget it though already perhaps they had forgotten him. His foot upon the gravel caught the ear of Mr. Brown, who came to the door and looked out curiously. When things of a mysterious character are happening in a house the servants are always vigilant. Brown came down stairs early; he suffered no sound to pass unnoticed. And now he came out into the early sunshine, and looked about like a man determined to