Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction, however, that the story as related _was_ incredible; that it was revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable grievance; that no man--least of all an astute rascal--would be likely to put into the hands of a woman--the baser sequel to whose ruin he was even then contemplating--a weapon so tipped with menace to himself,--this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the righteous lording of his acres. Still occasionally a restless spirit--that Harlequin bastard of Ariel and the earth-born Crasis--would whisper in his ear of vast world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records, strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them--Théroigne sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others--yet these two most persistently. * * * * * * * * The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,” into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”--with whom, indeed, he had often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though none had endeavoured to disprove one side of the _mot_ with more pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a manner so questionable.