“I suppose you have heard my name from Mrs. Clarendon?” Robert had asked in the course of their first conversation; and the lady had given an affirmative, with a smile which might or might not have meaning. “If Miss Warren has been admirable,” Robert remarked, “you, Mrs. Stratton, have been indispensable. What on earth should we have done without you?” “Oh, I have done nothing, except keep guard. But I shall carry her off as soon as I can.” “Whither?” “First of all to my own home. I live at present at Chislehurst, and have a house much too big for me. Colonel Stratton will probably be home before Christmas, and we shall make a party. I wish you could make it convenient to join us for a few days.” “It’s very good of you,” Robert replied with deliberate gratitude. “If all goes according to your expectation, I will come with pleasure.” They parted the best of friends, looking mutual compliments. “Now, why couldn’t Isabel be open with me?” mused Mrs. Stratton, after he had gone. “Several things begin to be a little clearer, I fancy.” “A capital little woman,” meditated Robert, on his way to the station. “I shouldn’t wonder if her friendship prove valuable.” And all three weeks it rained, rained with scarcely a day’s intermission. If the new road to Salcot was a mere mud-track, the state of the old road can be conjectured; its deep ruts had become watercourses, its erewhile grassy prominences were mere alluvial wastes. The piece of sward before the cottage gradually turned to swamp; the oak torso stood black with drenching moisture, its clinging parasite stems hung limp, every one of its million bark grainings was a channel for rain-drops. Behind, the copse was represented by the shivering nakedness of lithe twigs, set in a dark, oozy bed of decaying leaves and moss and fungi. Sometimes the rain fell straight from a gray sky without a rack feature from end to end, till all Nature seemed to grow of one colour, and the space between morning and evening was but a wan twilight of indistinguishable hours. Sometimes there glimmered at midday a faint yellowness, a glimpse of free heaven athwart thinning vapour, a smile too pale to hold forth promise. Sometimes there came towards nightfall a calling from the south-west, the sky thickened with rolling battalions overflashed at instants with an angry gleam, and blasts of fury drove the rain level with the reeking earth. Then there would be battle till dawn, followed, alas! by no glorious victory of the sun-god, but with more weeping of the heavens and sighing of the worn-out winds.