He remembered what society had told him about Mrs. Wornock; her encouragement of spirit-rapping people and thought-reading people, and every phase of modern super-naturalism; her passion for music--a passion so absorbing as almost to pass the border-line of sanity; at least in the opinion of the commonplace sane. He wondered no longer that such a woman had held herself aloof from the hunting, and shooting, and dinner-giving, and tea-drinking population scattered within a radius of eight or ten miles of Discombe; the people with whom, had she lived the conventional life of the conventional rural lady, she should have been on intimate terms. She was among them, but not of them, Allan told himself. "Surely I am not in love with a woman old enough to be my mother!" he thought, between jest and earnest, as he drove up to the house. "I have not thought so persistently of any woman since I was sick for love of the dean's pretty daughter, fairest and last of my calf-loves." He was not wholly in jest, for during the last three days the lady's image had haunted him with an insistency that bordered on "possession." It was as if those dark grey eyes had cast a spell upon him, and as if he must needs wait until the enchantress who held him in her mystic bands should unweave her mystery and set his thoughts at liberty. The hall door stood open to the summer air and the afternoon sun. A large black poodle, with an air of ineffable wisdom, was stretched near the threshold; a liver-and-white St. Bernard sunned his hairy bulk upon the grass in front of the steps; and on the broad terrace to the right of the house a peacock spread the rainbow splendour of his tail, and strutted in stately slowness towards the sun. "House and garden belong to fairyland," thought Allan. "The enchantress has but to wave her wand and fix the picture for a century. We may have extended the limit of human life a hundred years hence, and Mrs. Wornock's age may count as girlhood, when some gay young prince of fifty-five shall ride through the tangled woodland to awaken the sleeper. Who can tell? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.'" CHAPTER IV. "IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON." The hall door stood wide open to the sunlight, sufficiently guarded by that splendid brute, the St. Bernard. A middle-aged footman in the sober Wornock livery came at the sound of the bell, the St. Bernard watching the visitor with grave but friendly eyes, and evidently perfectly aware of his respectability. Mrs. Wornock was at home. A slow and solemn butler now appeared upon the scene, and led the way to a corridor which opened out of the hall; and at the end of this corridor, like Vandyke's famous portrait of Charles the First at Warwick Castle, the full-length portrait of a young man in a hunting-coat looked Allan Carew in the face.