For most of his years he had known no deeper affection than his friendship for this man. He had mourned him with a grief which, now to think on, seemed like a single furrow across the plain field of his life; and there he stood! "Captain, my Captain..." said Raymond. His rough voice trembled, and he laughed loud to conceal it. The other flashed round upon him with his rarely beautiful smile. "Ah," said he, "it’s like old times at last to hear you at your rags and tags of quotation again!" There fell again between them the pause that to both was so eloquent. Then, from the far distance, into their silence penetrated a faint uncouth sound: from the moorland road, the motor, carrying for ever out of their lives him who had had so much power upon them, and was now so futile a figure, seemed to raise a last impotent hoot. Sir Arthur Gerardine was gone. Raymond rubbed his hands and smiled as since boyhood he had scarcely smiled. "It is good," cried Harry, then, boyishly in his turn, "to see your nut-cracker grin once more, Ray. As Muhammed, I’ve looked for it many a time in vain—I thought I had lost my old sub." * * * * * "But there’s one thing we must remember," said Bethune, suddenly earnest again, in the midst of the welcome relaxation. "We must remember the old fellow’s threat. You will have a bit of a job to keep out of trouble with the powers that be, won’t you, after Sir Arthur’s meddling?" The anxiety on his countenance was not reflected upon English’s face. "I shall have my own story to tell," he said, "and I think that I have knowledge of sufficient value to make me a _persona grata_ in high quarters just now. They will be rather more anxious, I take it, to retain my services rather than dispense with them—in spite of Sir Arthur." He broke off, his brow clouded again. He sighed heavily. "But what does that matter?" he cried; "just now there is only one thing that matters in the whole world." *BOOK IV* *CHAPTER I* It was the most interesting case I have ever had (wrote M. Châtelard, in the third volume of his "Psychologie Féminine"), and the most abnormal. The illness, caused by shock, concussion—call it what you will—was benign, yet it was long. There was a little fever, a little delirium: un petit délire très doux, tout poétique, que, plongé dans mon vieux fauteuil de chêne, au milieu du silence de cet antique manoir, j’écoutais presqu’avec plaisir. Un gazouillement d’oiseau; une âme de femme, errant comme Psyché elle-même, sur les fleurs dans les jardins embaumés; délicates puerilitiés parfumées de la vie. Jamais une note de passion. Jamais un cri de ce coeur si profondement blessé.... And when later, by almost imperceptible steps, we drew the gentle creature back to health, the singular phenomenon persisted.