"Who is the guest, by the way? I am expecting a letter from you, forwarded from London. Probably you have written to Claridge’s. I would gladly accede to your request and come at once to the manor-house...." She stared, as the phrase caught her eyes, then laughed again: "Poor man—what was he thinking of?" She crumpled the sheet in her hand and walked on. The wind blew fiercely across the downs, every leaf and spray, every dry gorse-bush, every blade of rank grass was writhen and bent in the same direction. She struggled to the shelter of a hazel copse and sat her down. Before her stretched the moorland, dun-grey and yellow, dipping to the horizon; above her head the sky was leaden grey, charged with cloud wrack—a huge bowl of storm. She thought of that glowing Indian morning, when he had told her he must leave her, and of the twenty-four hours that had elapsed between that moment and their parting. What tenderness, gentler than a woman’s, had he not revealed to her then—Harry English, the hard man, fierce angel-leader of devils! And the words of Browning rushed back upon her, once again as a message of balm— ... two soul sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her. Ah, nothing could rob her of that! She had been the woman he had loved, and the soul side he had shown to her, most generous, most sacred, most beautiful, was what no other being in the Universe could have from him, not even his God! They had parted in the dawn, the Indian dawn, all shot with flame. Not once had he faltered in his resolute cheerfulness. He had kissed her and blessed her as she lay in bed. But at the door he had halted to look upon her a last time; and she was weeping. Then he had flung himself back beside her ... and now she closed her eyes and shuddered on the memory of his last kisses. With the chill barren earth beneath her, the lowering winter sky above, the sun-warmth of his love again enfolded her. It was as if his presence brooded upon her. Oh, could she but die and be with him! "Harry, I am yours," she called to him in the passion of her soul, "yours only—love, take me!" So strong seemed the atmosphere of his spirit about her, that she looked round wildly, almost feeling as if her soul-cry must have called back the dead. There stretched the iron earth, there hung the relentless skies—the world was empty. The copse where she had chosen to rest was on the higher downs, and before her the land fell away gently yet so surely that the high chimney-stack of the Old Ancient House would scarcely have caught the eye against the opposite slope, save for its rising smoke columns, which the wind seized and tore to flakes. As she gazed, unseeing, upon the desolate spectacle, a gleam of something unwonted, something like a huge crimson bird, moved vaguely tropical in all the duns and greys. She wondered awhile, and then realised: realised with a sudden sick spasm.