He had, he thought, done wrong in winning the heart of Mary Montgomerie without the permission of her proud old guardian and kinsman; but now he had little compunction for having done so, as that permission would never have been accorded to him, and he felt that his departure seemed a welcome move to all but her--a departure permitted to pass coldly, and without even a well-bred expression of regret. A farewell glance at the stately modern villa, and the grim old keep that towered behind it, showed him their walls all reddened in the early morning sun; the window-blinds close drawn, all closed as yet, save one. His heart told him it was that of Mary's room. The sash remained, of course, unlifted, but the blue silk curtain was festooned back, and every pulse vibrated within him when he saw the wave of a white handkerchief, just as the dog-cart went bowling down the wooded avenue towards the highway. It was Mary's farewell to him. Would the strains of the sweet old story, that never tires, come to their ears again? How would it all end between him and Mary Montgomerie, or was it ended now? CHAPTER XIII. IN SHADOW LAND. 'I am truly glad for Hew's sake, and for Mary's sake, that he has gone--gone ere it was too late!' thought Sir Piers, as he sat in his easy-chair in the library that afternoon, when nothing remained of Cecil Falconer at Eaglescraig but an aching pain in Mary's heart, and in the avenue the ruts of the wheels that had borne him away. His recent conversation with Hew about the dread of a _mésalliance_ made the old baronet's mind revert--as it too often did, bitterly and unavailingly--to another _mésalliance_ in his family, which nearly brought ruin--for such in the vanity of his soul he deemed disgrace--upon the Montgomeries of Eaglescraig, who had for ages been a power in the bailiwick of Cunninghame. 'It seems a pity that we should disturb the stagnant waters of that Dead Lake which men call the Past,' says Miss Braddon; but Sir Piers was rather prone to do so; and now, as he sat gazing into the red, clear, burning embers, they seemed to take divers shapes and forms, quaint and curious pictures, of which, in reality, he saw little, for his thoughts were treading upon each other fast, and in his dreamy yet steadfast gaze there was a fixed, a far-off look--a look in Shadowland. A childless old man, he was thinking of what was now, and all that might have been, but for his own stubborn will and pride of heart. Some five-and-twenty years before this time, he had a son who had been the pride of that heart, and valued all the more as being the only child of a young and beautiful wife, after whose death he had never married again, but sought relief from thought amid the wars of British India.