"Ah, there you are," he cried in a tone of obvious relief when his white-flannelled figure appeared against the deep dusk of the bushes that lined the stream. "I was getting anxious, and I did not know what to do. I should have come out to look for you, but I did not know where you might be coming from." And that little touch of anxiety was perhaps the first sign that he had shown since he had abandoned himself to bitterness that his heart was not dead: never before had the faintest spark of the sense of human comradeship or its solicitudes appeared. Then Merivale knew that the fortnight that Philip had already spent here had not been utterly wasted, and before going to bed that night he wrote one line of hope to Mrs. Home. [Illustration: text decoration] FIFTEENTH A couple of days after this the weather suddenly broke, and for the unclouded and azure skies they had a day of low, weeping heavens, with an air of dead and stifling dampness. Never for a moment through the hours of daylight did the sullen downpour relax; the trees stood with listless, drooping branches, from which under the drenching rain a few early autumn leaves kept falling, though the time of the fall of the leaf was not yet. In the garden beds the plants had given up all attempts to look gay or to stand up, and bent drearily enough beneath the rain that scattered their petals and dragged their foliage in the muddy earth. The birds, too, were silent; only the hiss of the rain was heard, and towards afternoon the voice of the river grew a little louder. Merivale, however, was undeterred and quite undepressed by these almost amphibious conditions, and, as usual, went off after breakfast for one of those long rambles of his in the forest, leaving Philip alone. There was no hint of unfriendliness taken in this; indeed, Philip had exacted a promise from his host on the evening of arrival that his normal course of life should be undisturbed.