All the colours of autumn were over the village when I arrived. A beautiful late afternoon sunlight bathed thatch and meadow. But it was close and hot. A child, two dogs, a very old woman with a heavy basket I encountered. One or two incurious tradesmen looked idly up as I passed by. It was all so rural and so still, my whimsical impulse had so much flagged, that for a while I hesitated to venture under the shadow of the sycamore-tree to enquire after the happy pair. I deliberately passed by the faint-blue gates and continued my walk under the high green and tufted wall. Hollyhocks had attained their topmost bud and seeded in the little cottage gardens beyond; the Michaelmas daisies were in flower; a sweet warm aromatic smell of fading leaves was in the air. Beyond the cottages lay a field where cattle were grazing, and beyond that I came to a little churchyard. Then the road wound on, pathless and houseless, among gorse and bracken. I turned impatiently and walked quickly back to the house and rang the bell. The rather colourless elderly woman who answered my enquiry informed me that Miss Seaton was at home, as if only taciturnity forbade her adding, "But she doesn't want to see _you_." "Might I, do you think, have Mr. Arthur's address?" I said. She looked at me with quiet astonishment, as if waiting for an explanation. Not the faintest of smiles came into her thin face. "I will tell Miss Seaton," she said after a pause. "Please walk in." She showed me into the dingy undusted drawing-room, filled with evening sunshine and the green-dyed light that penetrated the leaves overhanging the long French windows. I sat down and waited on and on, occasionally aware of a creaking footfall overhead. At last the door opened a little, and the great face I had once known peered round at me. For it was enormously changed; mainly, I think, because the old eyes had rather suddenly failed, and so a kind of stillness and darkness lay over its calm and wrinkled pallor. "Who is it?" she asked. I explained myself and told her the occasion of my visit. She came in and shut the door carefully after her and, though the fumbling was scarcely perceptible, groped her way to a chair. She had on an old dressing-gown, like a cassock, of a patterned cinnamon colour. "What is it you want?" she said, seating herself and lifting her blank face to mine. "Might I just have Arthur's address?" I said deferentially. "I am so sorry to have disturbed you." "H'm. You have come to see my nephew?" "Not necessarily to see him, only to hear how he is, and, of course, Mrs. Seaton too. I am afraid my silence must have appeared...." "He hasn't noticed your silence," croaked the old voice out of the great mask; "besides, there isn't any Mrs. Seaton." "Ah, then," I answered, after a momentary pause, "I have not seemed so black as I painted myself! And how is Miss Outram?" "She's gone into Yorkshire," answered Seaton's aunt. "And Arthur too?"