They said little more that night, my lord putting on a cloak to hide his powder-blackened coat, and kissing her very kindly before he went. He gave her a few words of warning, commended Mrs. Jael to her, and spoke of the money that should be forthcoming. Barbara was to see no one but Mrs. Jael and her mother. They were to keep her locked in her room till my lord should bring a physician whom he could trust to inquire into the state of the girl’s mind. Yet there was one thought that haunted Stephen Gore as he walked home alone by the light of the moon without a single torch to keep him company and scare away footpads: it was possible that the girl might turn against herself. And though he tried not to hanker after the chance, he knew how it would simplify the tangle. Barbara’s window stood some height from the ground, and there were no bars to it. My lord remembered these details before he went to bed. He was careful to show the man Rogers his blackened coat, and to tell him that he had been fired at by some villain, but that the ball had missed him by some mercy of God. Mrs. Jael came down from her attic next day soon after dawn, her eyes red and suffused, her bosom full of sentimental sighings. She went about the house, blubbering ostentatiously in odd corners, dabbing with her handkerchief, and setting all the servants spying on her. Yet all she would say was: “Poor dear, poor sweet! The brain is turned over in her. And so young, too! I always was afeard of it, she took it so to heart. Oh, dear Lord, what a sad world it is, surely! The poor child’s made me ten years older.” And then she would shuffle away, jerking her fat shoulders and trying to smother sobs, so that every servant in the house knew that something strange had happened, and were ready to hear of anything—and to accept it as an interesting fact. XX John Gore, riding over the yellow stubbles with some burly farmer at his side, seemed very far from the stately littlenesses of Whitehall. For, next to the open sea, John Gore had always loved the open country, either moor, field, or forest, so long as the eye could take in some sweeping distance. He loved, also, the smell of the soil, the byres, and the old farm-houses with the scent of the hay and the fragrant breath of cattle at milking-time. Much of his boyhood clung to the memories of it all, where the play of lights and shadows upon the moors made the purples and greens and gold as glorious as the colors of sky and sea at sunset.