In, another moment he had stepped out into the January morning. It was clear and still as the night had been. In the east there was a pale promise of sun; the reddish-brown trunks of the fir woods had just caught it and rose faintly in glowing in endless vistas and colonnades one behind the other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had gleaming films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a festal air under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill leading to Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their wintry twigs and branches set against stretches of frost-whitened grass, till finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. In a copse close at hand there were woodcutters at work, and piles of gleaming laths shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along the frosty road, and as he walked on through the houses toward the bridge, Robert’s quick ear distinguished that most wintry of all sounds--the cry of a flock of field-fares passing overhead. As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure upon it, the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, leaning against the stone parapet. With a start he recognized the Squire. He went up to him without an instant’s slackening of his steady step. The Squire heard the sound of someone coming, turned, and saw the Rector. ‘I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, stopping and holding out his hand. ‘I meant to have come to talk to you about this place this morning. I ought to have come before.’ He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had parted the day before. The Squire touched his hand for an instant. ‘You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,’ he said, endeavoring to speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy lips twitched nervously, ‘that, for one reason and another, I knew nothing of the epidemic here till yesterday, when Meyrick told me.’ ‘I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here now, Mr. Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, may I take you through and show you the people?’ The Squire at last looked at him straight--at the face worn and pale, yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which something of the solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to be still lingering. ‘Are you just come?’ he said abruptly, ‘or are you going back?’ ‘I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of the fever cases. It’s hard work for the nurses and the relations sometimes, without help.’ The Squire moved on mechanically toward the village, and Robert moved beside him. ‘And Mrs. Elsmere?’ ‘Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay the night when the diphtheria was at its worst; but there are only four anxious cases left, the rest all convalescent.’